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AWAII... 



. . A Snap Shot 




BEING THE RECORD OF A TRIP 



TO THE 



a 



PARADISE OF THE PACIFIC" 



IN WHICH THE TRUTH OF GENERAL IMPRESSIONS MORE THAN LITERAL— 
AND OFTEN MISLEADING— FACT IS OFFERED. 



BY 

CONFLAGRATION JONES 

'^ ILLUSTRATED BY 

ART YOUNG and others 





CHICAGO: 
SMITH & COLBERT 
■ 1893. 



t^ 



w*^ 



-v-* 



^^^^ 



COPYRIGHT 1893 
BY 

SMITH & COLBERT 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 



PRESS OF 

SMITH & COLBERT 

350 DEARBORN ST. 

CHICAGO. 



A Word Before Starting. 



IN these doubtful days there are a lot of vital and pertinent questions asked 
about the Hawaiian Islands, the people and their ways, which the' ency- 
clopedia and the last Hawaiian census report fail to answer. Do not 
think I would question the value of encyclopedias or other four-pound books. 
By students aud thoughtful people everywhere they have been found match- 
less for pressing creases in trousers and doubtless have other uses ; but they 
do not cover the entire field. The following work tells all which the encyclo- 
pedia, through thoughtlessness, inadvertance or pressure on its columns failed 
to mention. 

There are some things truer than fact, — concrete fact without its proper 
explanitory background is often misleading. It has been the aim of the 
writer not so much to marshal facts in line as to present a picture, the verity 
of the impression of which, although neccessarily superficial, cannot be seri- 
ously questioned. Not that there are not facts enough in the work to satisfy 
the most radical Gadgrind, but the intent has been to disguise their taste. 

The observations upon which the work was based were made just prior 
to the downfall of the monarchy; but the conditions of life were and can be 
in no way changed by any political upheaval, past or prospective. 

CONFLAGRATION JONES. 

Chicago, November, 1893. 



^;^n 







.^^.eoon'-- wcKi}^ 



THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS AND THE REST OF THE WORLD. 



gMl KAUAI 



NilHAU 



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J^AUl 



TttC llA\^/^IIAri l>LAhP> 



Hawaii 



Coo^"sBA"( 





CHAPTER I. 



Remarks on the Water— The Pacific Ocean Nothing but a Large, 
Damp Confidence Game— Sea-Sickness and Its Remedies — 
Life on Shipboard. 




PEAKING of waves re- 
minds me that we trav- 
eled over the pictur- 
esque Salt Water route 
via Seasickville, giving 
us a good view of 
Heaveup Junction and 
the fine rural spot of 
Bile-on-the-Billow. It is an even seven days' trip 
from San Francisco to Honolulu over the bluest water 
that a washwoman ever used to rinse her clothes. I 
know the water is blue because I spent hours every 
day hanging over the rail in deep contemplation, and 
for other purposes not worth mentioning. 

The distance traversed is supposed to be 2,ioo 
miles, but the Oceanic Steamship Company had a gen- 
erous streak on and gave us action for fares. I have 
carefully estimated the lurches to port — at the rate of 
two per minute — to be 20,160 in number, and the 



WtQST£fi 



lurches to starboard would, of course, be the same in 
number. That would give us something like 4,000 
miles of movement. This, they inform me, was not the 
regular thing, but was gotten up for our especial delec- 
tation. 

I was told at home by an English ex-naval officer 




Mr. Balboa Christening the Pacific. 

that the Pacific was always like a billiard-table in the 
full bloom of health. I don't believe he ever saw the 
Pacific. I think he got his information out of the pri- 
mary geography that I worried through under pressure 
in the days of my childhood. According to the book. 



THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND ITS REPUTATION. 



the ocean was named the Pacific — "the peaceful" — by 
a mendacious Greaser called Balboa, who is portrayed 
as standing on a blufif in the attitude of a political 
speaker waiting for the applause to subside. The ocean 
is before him. His arm is extended like that of a man 
trying to flag a waiter whom he has failed to tip. His 
other arm and the rest of his person is in the posture 
of deep meditation. He is trying to think out a name 
which will enhance the price of Honolulu real estate 
and stimulate the Samoan boom. 

I have a disposition like a child ; I am not revenge- 
ful, but I would like to meet this man Balboa in some 
place where I had plenty of friends to drag us apart 
and hold me back, and prevent me reddening my hands 
in the gore of a fellow man. I would like to tell him 
in some neat but rich and juicy sarcasm how there is 
a position yawning for him as circulation affidavit edi- 
tor of a daily paper. 

I was led to believe that my middle name was 
Jonah, and that it was all my fault, as usual. The 
chief officer of the Australia, the ship which ferried us 
over to the islands, insisted that the weather was ex- 
ceptional, and that we should have made the previous 
run, or, failing in that, the one following, when, as he 
predicted, the sea would be as flat as a tennis court. 

To be urged to wait for the next boat, and to 
take passage in the same under an alias, after being a 
day and a half on a route that can't even boast of a 
milk station or a wood siding — or anything else that 
would give a repentent sinner a show to turn back — this 
was the kind of thing to make a man distrust friendly 
advice for the rest of his natural life. It was offered, 
too, at a time when I had sent my stomach down to 
the sJJip's laundry to have some stiffening starch put 
in. I was sick — both sea-sick and sick of the sea. 




The Only Sick Man on Board. 

Other people had " touches of malaria," and all that 
sort of thing. 

I em the only person of my acquaintance who had 
common, every-day sea-sickness. The first two or 



three days out the ship's physician did a rushing busi- 
ness in the consolation line. 

A ship's doctor draws a comfortable salary for ex- 
plaining to cabin passengers how it is not sea-sickness 
which has snowed them under, but something mysteri- 
ous with a long Latin name which sounds like a verse 
in the Polish declaration of independence. 

You understand that the rules of a ship lorbid 




Interested in Flying Fish. 

profanity forward of the gangways, and it is mighty- 
comforting to sea-sick passengers to lie in their bunks 
and have an accomplished linguist sit by and call their 
malady hard names and sass it in a dead language. 

Burridge, my companion du voyage, as they say in 
the south of Ireland, came on deck with a new disease 
every morning. When he bobbed up the first day I 
thought he was wearing a dough mask. He looked 
wildly around and commenced to make motions with 
his mouth like a district schoolboy who is out to speak 
a declamation; and the wrong lines keep rising to the 
surface and have to be swallowed with great effort. 

" Sea-sick, old man ?" 

"I? I sea-sick? Not much, but I'm not feeling 
well. The doctor says I've got a touch of information 
of the spaghetti. I tell you they've got a mighty able 
physician on board. He can tell what ails you with- 
out asking a question. He said I had been eating 
something. Excuse me a moment — they say that fly- 
ing fish can be seen. I'm very much interested in fly- 
ing fish," and then he shot off" looking for a secluded 
nook out of sight of the ladies, where he could give his 
" information " a fair field and no tavor. 

Everyone has a pet cure for sea-sickness, and Bur- 
ridge has a new one. He lay moaning in his berth, 
crying out for something to stay down. " I wonder if 
glue would stick ?" he said. It was but an idle fancy 
on which he had no thought of realizing, but it fur- 
nished me with an idea. I rang for the berth steward, 
who was a solemn personage, said " sir " with painful 
frequency, and grudgingly gave up sympathy in a 
purely official way during his watch. 

"Please bring that poor, sick gentlemen in No. 33 
some liquid glue," I ordered. 



THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND ITS REPUTATION. 



"Yes, sir. Spalding's or LePage's, sir?" 

" LePage's, and fix it up with salt and pepper so 

that it will be tempting to the palate — and, by the way, 

call it extract of beef." 

" Yes, sir ; glue, sir, with salt and pepper, sir," and 

t 




Exercise After Meals. 

the steward inserted his thumb in his right ear and 
jerked it away again in a wax figuresque way. 

I departed, not to interfere with the onward prog- 
ress of events. In an hour or two Burridge came on 
deck with the fixed celluloid smile of a premiere dansu- 



ese. "That extract of beef is just what I needed. It's 
the only thing that will associat-e with me long enough 
to get acquainted. It's immense." 

" My boy, that wasn't extract of beef. That was 
glue." 

He became ghastly as the idea struck in. " Good 
heavens, I am lost ! My insides are stuck together and 
I will never eat again. I knew this foreign travel would 
be the death of me." A brutal sailor, noticing his 
emotion, came up, touched his hat, and requested him 
to " Please go leeward and weep in the sea, if it is all 
the same to you." 

The Pacific Ocean is a perfect paradise for that 
class of people who are inquisitive about their neigh- 
bors and who do not feel easy in their minds unless 
they know what their acquaintances had for dinner. I 
have always endeavored to keep dark what I have been 
eating, particularly after partaking of onions, but on 
Senor Balboa's Pacific it was of no use. The fatal 
secret was wrested from me three times per day, and 
the gossip mongers had it all their own way. 

I must say that the officers of the Australia were 
very considerate. Whenever a passenger came on deck 
and looked like a chicken in the act of drinking, they 
invariably turned their faces and affected to see a ship 
in great distress on the horizon. The tourists were 
thus allowed to seek vacant spots on the rail and smg 
solos to the old and well-known words, which com- 
menced " Yeep — Yeep — oho — waugh — good heavens 
Yeep." It sounded like a Kanaka love song, but it 
wasn't.*' On the Atlantic the officers use a cold British 
stare or an official smile on the victim which, added to 
the remorse of a guilty stomach, makes the tourist pant 
for a Pullman car. 





' pia^mori^.lfea.d,j ^gbqoMy 



CHAPTER 11. 



Mutiny by the Smart Alexander of the Ship — Our Welcome to 
Honolulu — Surprises — A Chinese Hotel Clerk. 




E HAD a mutiny on 
the ship. The mutin- 
eer was a young man 
from Chicago whose 
entire workmg capital 
consisted of a male 
parent who cashed 
sight drafts with the 
reckless abandon of infatuation, and nerve that a dia- 
mond couldn't scratch. He said that his father sent 
him to take a trip on salt water and advised him to 
indulge in ocean bathing. 

I always had a suspicion that the old gentleman 
wanted him to get on terms of familiar intimacy with 
the salt, salt sea, in the hope that the saline matter 
would strike in. 



This young man — I will call him De Pett — started 
in by giving all of us advice like a dollar fortune-teller. 
He tackled a banker and told him about the mistakes 
he had made in his youth, and advised him to reform 
and go fishing whenever old Financial Crash struck 
town. 

De Pett even reached for me. I was traveling 
about one-half or two-thirds in cog. He sidled up to 
me with the idea of seeing me about it. I quickly 
made up my mind to feign insanity if he should com- 
mence to exude advice. However, he merely asked, 
" What's your line, Mister?" 

Now the only line I have in the world is a clothes 
line in my back yard, and Mrs. Jones is president of it 
at that. " You mean my business ?" I asked. 

"Yes; what's your business out here?" 

" I am here to introduce to the benighted savages 
of the South Seas the Jones perforator and embosser." 

" What's that for, may I ask ?" 

"The Hawaians, you understand, have been eating 
their tripe plain. I will introduce my machine which 
embosses and perforates tripe, as it is eaten in the most 
refined Michigan avenue circles." 

I supposed that his appetite for conversation 
would be cloyed, but I was mistaken. He chipped 
right in with: "Well, if your tripe embosser is a fail- 
ure I should advise you to put ink on the teeth of the 
machine and sell it to the natives for tatooing them- 
selves. I think that would work nicely." 

I saw at once that I would have to offer extra in- 
ducements to get him to shun me. I don't want to say 
too much of the young man's doings, but he was one 
of the most perfect specimens of the smart Alexander 
in existence, and all he needed was chloroform and a 
railroad spike driven through his wishbone impalling 
him to the bottom of a glass case to be of the utmost 
value to science. 

The signs notifying the passengers of the laws of 

8 



THE FATE OF THE MUTINEER. 



the ship aggravated him worse than parliamentary rules 
do a woman's rights convention. There was one notice 
which read : 



Please Dont' Josh the Man 
AT THE Wheel. 



and another which remarked 



Passengers are Requested Not to Bor- 
row Tobacco of Officers of the 
Watch. 



De Pett looked at them in frowning indignation. 




He Would Sue the Captain. 

" I'm from Chicago, and the Constitution of the United 
States accords me the right to josh any one I please." 

Then he went up and tried it. Captain Hou- 
dlette called his attention to the literature on the sign- 
boards in the quiet way of sea captains. 

De Pett turned on him in a blaze of magnificent 
wrath. " I want you to understand that I am a gen- 
tleman, and no ordinary tourist," which he wasn't. "I 
have paid the Oceanic Company $125 for a round-trip 
passage, and I'm going to have $125 worth of kind 
and gentlemanly treatment, sir. I demand the full 
amount, with no discount for cases, exchange or cart- 
age, sir, or I will sue the company. I will report you, 
sir. Yesterday the ship was rocking severely, sir, and 
I wanted to walk on deck. I asked you on behalf of 
myself and some lady friends on board to anchor the 
boat an hour or two so that it would stand still and we 
could take our exercise. You refused, sir. You merely 
said, '* Holy Sailor, anchor in five miles of water ?' That 



answer was very offensive to a gentleman, and 1 will 
not sit quiet under it." 

One of his acquaintances dragged the young man 
away and told him he was guilty of mutiny, and mutiny 
was usually the thing which superinduced wind failure 
through suspension at the yardarm by a coarse, vulger 
rope. If he didn't look out he would finish the voyage 
in irons anyway. 

De Pett subsided with a swoon and kept pretty 
dark after that, avoiding the Captain, cutting the latter 
off from his most reliable source of amusement. But 
De Pett kicked behind his back, and said he thought 
the skipper was sojering. He hadn't seen him pull a 
rope or cuss out the men since he started, and he didn't 
holler his orders like they do on the canals at home 

De Pett thought he wasn't the kind of man to 
stand at the bow when we got into the region of ice- 
bergs and shove 'em out of the way with a pitchfork. 
He wanted the boat run like a Blue Island avenue 
horse car. 

When, one morning a short time afterward, a ribald 
sign stating : 



Passengers Must Not Feed Pea- 
nuts to THE Captain 



was found tacked to that dignitary's door, every one 
looked at De Pett, who strove to look as unconscious 
of guilt as a man who just discovers he has drank from 
a finger bowl, thinking he was getting an extra large 
glass of lemonade. 

Early on the morning of the seventh day word 




Official Tongue Inspection. 

was passed forward that we could unlash our livers 
preparatory to going ashore, the rest of the trip being 
under the lea of Oahu, the island on which Honolulu is 
located, and therefore free from the deadly Pacific roll 
which we always had for breakfast with our coffee. 

The only thing I could find fault with was the way 



lO 



A WELCOME TO THE PEACEFUL ISLES. 



we sighted land. No one yelled " Land ho !" I ex- 
pected to see one of the hired men go up to the six- 
teenth story of the rigging and make that cheering re- 
mark, just as it is portrayed on the plug tobacco adver- 
tisements. I will never put any faith in plug tobacco 
after this. They told me they discontinued the prac- 
tice after sending up a sailor from Boston, who called 
down : 

" Land agricultural implement !* 

Upon going on deck we found the mountains 
2,000 or 3,000 feet high, sticking out of the water on 
the starboard bow, while off to the south loomed the 
faint outline of Molokai, the island on which the lepers 
^re sequestered. 




Welcome to Honolulu. 

The first glance at Oahu has been described as for- 
bidding and bare, and as though a quartz crusher 
would be required to make soil out of it. It was yel- 
lowish brown and gray in the morning sun and looked 
to me like a lot of cooking-school cakes that had erupted 
when half baked. 

There was, however, a bright fringe of verdure 
along the coast line, with an occasional cocoanut palm 
sticking up like a feather duster with two-thirds of its 
tail-feathers jerked out. 

I was informed that the mountains were once cov- 
efed with verdure, but that the wild goats had eaten 
them bare. The poor goats of Honolulu had but few 
bill boards to feed on, and were forced by dire necessity 
to fall back on just common leaves and grass. The 
islands ought to encourage theatrical enterprises which 
are lavish with three-sheet posters and save its foliage. 

Rounding Diamond Head, a volcanic promontory 
about five miles from Honolulu, that city bursts upon 



the view. There is much of greenery and much to re- 
mind a man, besides the temperature, that he is in the 
tropics. 

The town lies on a gentle slope a few miles in 
width, having a background of mountains, whose sum- 
mits are almost always enshrouded in clouds and mist. 

Honolulu does a large and growing business in 
the port line, with all the modern conveniences — quar- 
antine officers empowered by law to make people stick 
out their tongues, custom house officers who write 
Chinese passwords on your luggage in chalk, pilots who 
come out with plug hats with election news, and all 
that. The town, it must be remembered, has a popu- 
lation of over 25,000, and the arrival of the steamer is 
the only circus it has. 

Our reception was very flattering. As the Aus- 
tralia was warped up to the dock we saw that they 
were all there to receive us. I said all — I mean all but 
two. One of the two had broken his leg the day be- 
fore and sent his regrets. The other was dead, and I 
think deserved to be excused on that account. 

But the balance of the populous, who had been 
notified at daylight by telephone from the opposite side 
of the island when the steamer was sighted, flocked 
around so that we did not notice the fact that there 
were two absentees. 

The sight was gay beyond the powers of descrip- 
tion — that is to say, of any one but a society editor. 
The galaxy of Hawaiian beauty was something to make 
the timbers of the dock creak. 

Hundreds of coy Kanaka belles, none of them 
weighing less than 250 pounds, and clad in bright-hued 
Mother Hubbards, stood there waving their handker- 
chiefs, entranced at the spectacle of Burridge, who stood 
well up forward in an elaborate toilet, with his hand 
over his heart, as though he were playing an engage- 
ment in the Eden Musee as Emperor William in wax. 

A citizen of Honolulu whom I had up to that mo- 
ment regarded as a friend said to us: "This is a fine 
reception they are tendering you, and you ought to get 
up and thank them for it. I assure you it is the cus- 
tom of the country, and the people will feel hurt if you 
fail to respond." 

Burridge said he couldn't make a speech except 
when he was mad, and so the duty fell upon me. 

I leaped to the rail and commenced : " Ladies 
and- — and gentlemen of Honolulu-lulu-lu : In behalf 
of Mr. Burridge and myself I wish to thank you for 
this magnificent demonstration. When I look upon 
this vast throng I feel overpowered, as it were, over- 
whelmed " Just then a low, vulgar sailor pitched 

quoits vl^ith a coil of ropve, using my lithe frame for a 
peg. He scored a ringer the first time. ' 

I sank to the deck and the thousands of gazelle- 
eyed native beauties screamed with mocking laughter, 
while my friends unwound about twenty fathoms of 
rope off my anatomy. I have my suspicion that the 
Honolulu man knew all the time that the crowd wasn't 
there to see us, and if he was trying to joke with me I 
don't think it was a bit funny. 

Honolulu was quite a shock to people of our deli- 
cate nerves. I once heard a dime museum lecturer, in 
exhibiting the tatooed man, say that he was a native 



HONOLULU AND ITS SURPRISES, 



II 



of the Sandwich Islands, and somehow I got the idea 
that the prominent citizens of that city went around 
with the latest style of winter trousers, consisting 
largely of red and blue ink in designs of eagles, scrolls, 




"Climb a Cocoanut Palm for Dessert." 

the American flag, and reptiles all embroidered on the 
cuticle in a way calculated to last. 

When I discovered my error it was a great disap- 
pointment, for I expected that the city was a gigantic 
dime museum with nothing to pay at the door. 

Burridge and I put our little gripsacks, containing 
twenty years' gatherings, in the custody of the Kanaka 
Custom House, and took a carriage for the hotel. The 
drive was a pleasant one, some parts of the town look- 
ing like New Orleans, but the balance resembled Hon- 
olulu more than any place I have yet seen. 

There was another shock lying in wait for us at 
the hotel. It was nothing like camp-meeting, and the 
landlord didn't blow on a conch shell to call us to din- 
ner, and the guests didn't all sit around and eat with 
their fingers out of the same gourd. I had dreamed of 
lying under a jujubu paste tree with my mouth open 
to let the gum drops drop into it as they ripened and 
fell. I even thought we would have to dig our own 
bananas for lunch and climb a cocoanut tree for dessert. 

The only real novelty offered us was a Chinese 
hotel clerk. There were three or four American clerks, 
but the belle of the lot was the Chinaman. 

I have chased around foreign climes before now, 
with a lean gripsack and a yearning for home, hunting 
up a night's rest on the European plan, and met many 
brands of clerks. I have gazed into the glaring eye- 
balls of the fierce New Jersey clerk while my celluloid 
collar rattled inharmoniously around in the basement 
of my black, shiny, self-inflated grip. Incidentally I 
wish to state that it is ever safer to carry a valise 
which is obese in appearance and looks heavy by sheer 



native force of character and pasteboard stiffening — 
one which bulges just as much when filled with smok- 
ing-car atmosphere as when surcharged with gold bul- 
lion and diamonds in the bulk. Those accordeon 
action grips are a mistake to a man who has to' finan- 
cier his way through life. 

But I was talking of clerks and meant to say that 
I had had it out to a finish with the deadly English 
female clerk who draws beer with one hand, makes 
tatting with the other, and keeps books on a slate with 
her nose. 

I have been made to feel how slight a thing is all 
human greatness by the Continental clerk who decHnes 
to tell you the amount of your bill unless you tip him 
or her for it. But I never yet struck a clerk who daz- 
zled without paralyzing, as did A. Sing of the Hawaiian 
hotel. It was w^orth a 4,000-mile trip to hear him bang 
a bell and yell " Flunt !" 

We asked Sing to get our things out of the 
clutches of a custom house which seemed unduly in- 
quisitive about my tooth brush and my other collar. 

We left him inserting foreign language into a tele- 
phone which seemed to be an accompUshed linguist, 
for it worked just as well as when English was used. 
When we returned, he said : 




"Flunt!" 

" I have tlelphone moan sic times flo yo slings. 
Th' cussem house plobably wear'n 'em," Sing had 
been graduated from the laundry business, and knew 
how it was. 




CHAPTER III 



Mainly Historical. The Discovery and a Naming of the Islands by 
Captain Cootc. His Fatal Mistake. 




■IE contumely which has for 
ages been heaped upon the 
ossified sandwich of rail- 
way travel has rendered 
the term "sandwich" ex- 
tremely unpopular on the 
Hawaiian Islands. The natives seem to feel the dis- 
grace keenly. Any young man who goes out there 
and expects to be received into good society will find 



T^e >pot-YY|^erel7e:vya^."Killed!» 



it advisable to feign ignorance if anything in the sand- 
wich line be forced on his attention. This circumstance 
came near getting us into trouble. Burridge has long 
been addicted to the ham sandwich vice. Almost any 
hour of the day in Chicago, if he were seized and 
searched, what is technically known as a " hammer " or 
"corned beefer" might be shaken out of his clothing. 
He was gently warned about it when he reached here, 
but he persisted in flaunting his food in the face of a 
muttering populace. 

" This is a bluff," said Burridge. " I don't believe 
they will do anything." 

" That is what Cook thought when he was here," 
put in Barrister Peterson. 

"Cook? What Cook? You mean the Cook's 
tourist man?" 

"No. Cap Cook, old Cap Cook, who came here 
first. He discovered the islands and the natives didn't 
kick very hard, but he made his mistake when he tried 
to name them the Sandwich Islands. They didn't 
like the name." 

"What happened to him?" asked Burridge, getting" 
interested, 

" Oh, nothing much — they don't call it much here. 
The first time they caught him out alone they hit him 
with a base-ball bat all covered with warts and bun- 
ions and they filed the clothes off him with a pole 
covered with shark's teeth all sticking out. He squirmed 
around some, for the teeth ripped up furrows on his 
hide like a patent corn planter, and so they impaled 
him to the earth with spiears like three-pronged har- 
poons, or lightning rod tips." 

" That was fiendish ! " exclaimed the horror-stricken 
Burridge. 

"Well now, you couldn't blame 'em much, you see. 



12 



»"MiliBMH<Hllwi 



SOME HISTORY NEVER BEFORE DIVULGED, 



n 



he used the term ' sandwich' on 'em without their con- 
sent." 

" What became of him ? " 

" They got a flat stone and put it an his head and 
piled lava on it until his skull began to crunch." 

" Did that kill him ? " 

" Oh, no; not yet. You see, the native Kanaka is 
naturally a polite and light-hearted being, although he 
is terrible when he smells a sandwich. Cap Cook had 
by this time got restless in the legs. They have a 
spear they catch squid with, and they stuck several of 
them through his legs into the earth. When they did 
this Cap remarked, "Well, boys, I'm not kicking." 

"Oh, this is awful!" 

"As I said before, the Kanaka is polite and ac- 
commodating. The weather was close and they took 
a cord or so of stone off Cap's head to give him air. 
Then they offered to send home any messages, collect. 




Death of Captain Cook. 

that he might wish, and to see that his last words 
were correctly reported for the Honolulu Morning Ad- 
vertiser. Then they asked him how he liked the cli- 
mate. You see there is nothing of which the Hawai- 
ian, whether he be native, domesticated, or recently im- 
ported, is so proud as his climate." 
"What did he say?" 



" He was English, you remember, and tourists of 
that nationality are not very social, as a rule. Cap 
Cook's insular reserve was not broken through, even 
with a native meat ax. Some men never are social, 
you know. His lack of geniality hurt the natives, and 
they piled the stone back on his head and a poi fed 
native sat on the crest of the pile and sang the latest 
popular song, — one of those songs, you know, that are 
so popular that the singing of them disrupts families 
and breeds homocide." 

"When Cap heard the song he hollered 'enough!' 
He was pretty feeble by this time, and as a native 
happened along with a calabash of melted lava which 
he had just got from a neighboring flow, they put it to 
the Cap's lips with the invitation to ' drink hearty.' He 
did so and was heard to murmer, ' I wonder how that 
Peoria whiskey got here.'" 

"Yes, go on." 

"Then the lava hardened on his insides and he 
didn't converse any more. The natives probably 
thought it was his English hauteur coming on again, 
and it angered them. You have seen a man who is no 
carpenter open a can of corn beef with a blunt-edge 
case knife. Well that is the way the Kanakas went 
prospecting in Cap Cook's vitals. The ax they used 
was a stone one, and was a very dull and unworkman- 
like tool. They haggled too much for comfort." 

" Brutal ! " 

" Yes, the ax might have been a little sharper." 

" I mean the whole thing is horrible." 

"You forget," remonstrated Mr. Peterson, "what 
provoked the deed. You forget Captain Cook's attempt 
to force an offensive name on these fair islands. You 
forget the effect of the name or the appearance of the 
sandwich has on native character usually so docile." 

During this recital of the fate of the discoverer of 
the Hawaiian Islands, Burridge grew as pale as one- 
finger poi. He excused himself, slipped away and tak- 
ing his choice private stock of sandwiches, temporarily 
secreted it between the mattresses of my bed. 

When darkness came on he sauntered out of the 
hotel with a package under his arm and the assumed 
nonchalance of a desperate man. He skulked down 
alleys, and avoiding the glare of the electric light, headed 
for the sea. 

I was not present but I suppose there was a 
shadowy figure seen for a moment poised on a rock 
against the sky, a deep wail of anguish o'er the part- 
ing, the splash of a heavy object tossed into the bosom 
of the deep, and the restless waves closed over the 
secret of Burridge's crime. 

At any rate he came back from his night trip 
ostentatiously eating a banana. 




CHAPTER IV 



Rapid Transit — Horses with Anglo-Mania — Lost in a Tram-Car — 
Burridge as a Prayer Killing Kahuna— A Trip to the Pali. 

HE town of Honolulu 
has solved the pro- 
blem of rapid transit. 
It has done so by 
never being in a hur- 
ray, which is the 
easiest way out I 
know. And yet every 
one rides. No one 
with any social pres- 
tige — no one with 
any social pull ever 
thinks of walking. If 
you don't own a car- 
riage you ride in a 
hack. The hacks 
here are very nice, 
and I discovered that 
when the Niagra Falls hackman dies he goes to 
Honolulu. 

The natives ride horses just like cowboys. 
This statement includes the female natives as 
well. It is a common sight to see the coy Kanaka 
maiden of 250 pounds sitting astride a 225-pound 
horse, and getting speed and action out of it which is 
truly surprising to a humane man. In fact the habit 
of riding astride has been adopted by a great number 
of white ladies. 

It is easier on the horse, which doesn't count. It 




is immeasurably safer for the rider, which also doesn't 
count. It looks infinitely better than side-saddle rid- 
ing, which counts for everything. 

But to go back to the subject of rapid transit. 

Our first discovery was to the effect that the 
debilitating seeds of Anglo-mania seem to have been 
planted in Honolulu, for they call their street cars 
" trarri-cars," or " trams." Such shameless abandon 
could not be outdone in New York. 

With the spirit of investigation strong within us, 
Burridge and I, as early as possible without exciting 




"The Kanaka Belle's Rapid Transit." 

suspicion, started out to do a little business with the 
Honolulu street cars. 

We boarded a bobtail about 9 o'clock of the 
second evening of our arrival. The passengers dropped 



14 



LOST IN A BOB-TAIL CAR. 



15 



out early in the game, but we resolved to see the end 
of the line. 

The course ran through tropical gardens, and after 
awhile the electric lights got scarce and things seemed 
lonesome and sad. 




"Following The Iron 'Spoor.'" 

We could hear the sea moaning like a man whose 
wife was chasing around the neighborhood to borrow 
a peppermint bottle for him. The tropical foliage along 
the sides of the road swayed and beckoned in the 
breeze like hackmen who are forbidden by ordinance 
to " accost the traveler or solicit patronage by word of 
mouth," as the law reads in some towns. 

The tram-car meanwhile rolled placidly on. 

The moon became obscured behind a cloud, and 
the wild note of the tulu bird quivered on the night air 
like the yelp of an amateur flutist who is hit by a 
brick and does not let go the instrument. 

The car jogged around corners so many times that 
we couldn't tell which way north was. Experts in 
getting lost have assured me that there is nothing which 
gives a lost man so much pleasure as to know where 
north really lies. He may not be able to use it in his 
business, but still it is a great comfort. 

The situation was becoming strained. We were 
both suspecting each other of unpardonable ignorance 
on the subject of our whereabouts, when Burridge 
asked : 

" Know where we are, Jones?" 

"This is a new one on me; do you know ?" 

" No-o. His voice trembled like a fat man's shirt- 
stud at a minstrel show. I saw he feared the worst. 
" But we can ask the driver." 

" Yes, that's so. You can ask the driver." 

" You better ask "im." 

"Aw, no, you do it." Our previous communica- 
tion with the Kanaka driver was of painful character. 
All the English he used was composed of cuss words 
which he festooned on the corners of the mules. 



Burridge will go to his grave in a doubtful frame 
of mind whether he was insulted or not. You under- 
stand we got in, put our nickels in the slot and rode 
awhile; then the Kanaka opened the door and said 
something we didn't understand. 

Burridge asked me to translate it, and I told him 
that he was using Professor Gamer's monkey language 
on us. He got mad at being taken for a gorilla, and 
every time the driver looked back, Burridge wrinkled up 
his nose and shook his fist at him, we being the only 
passengers. He, however, kept ringing a bell, and we 
tried some more nickels in the slot. This appeased 
him, and he transferred his thoughtful consideration 
from Burridge to the off mule. 

Burridge agreed after some urging to try the In- 
dian sign language on the Kanaka. He moved up on 
him and began to draw circles in the atmosphere with 
his forefinger, all the time showing the whites of his 
eyes like an amateur Lady Macbeth. Then he whirled 
around like a ballet-dancer. 

All this was to signify that we were turned around, 
but the Kanaka did not stop to figure out the combin- 
ation. He backed off the platform and melted out of 
sight like a $10 note in the glad Christmas tide. 

Burridge looked at me and I looked at Burridge. 
The great, crushing truth came home to us simultane- 
ously; we were 5,000 miles away from home and lost — 
lost in a tram-car. 

Burridge recovered the use of his voice first, but it 
came brokenly. " I have heard," said he, "that mules 
have been eaten in cases of emergency, and that they 
sustain life for a long time." 




"The Horse with Anglo-Mania." 

The idea was not inviting. It was even less so 
when I went out and looked at the animals, which were 
settling on their foundations. Ossification had already 
set in. 

" We must have courage," said Burridge, " and face 



i6 



DIRE EFFECT OF MISFIT SIGN LANGUAGE. 



this problem. If we only had a turn-table we might 
escape that mule-chop breakfast. But we haven't got 
it. We seem to have acquired the street car all right, 
but the blamed thing is headed the wrong way. What 
will we do ?" 

I couldn't see much bon vivant business in the 
mules, and voted for adjournment in the general direc- 
tion of Honolulu's trade center. 

He agreed to this and wrenched the car lantern 
off its perch, and we started back in some doubt. Let 
it be confessed that we had not gone far when Burridge 
stumbled. He looked down and there was the street 
car track. 

" Ah, ha ! " he exclaimed, " here is the iron spoor of 
the tram-car, as my friend Haggard would say." After 
this discovery the rest was easy. 

We tracked back and reached the hotel at about 
midnight and told Landlord Johnson about our getting 
lost. "Why in Sam Hill," said Johnson, "didn't you 
ask your questions in English.? Those drivers can talk 
English better than you can. The company is an En- 
glish one, and all the employes are required to use the 
English accent during business hours." 

It was the Cockney patois that we failed to recog- 
nize at first. But the end was not yet. The next 
morning we were visited by the police. The charge, if 
I remember rightly, was stealing and otherwise feloni- 
ously abstracting a street car, vi et armis, with two 
certain draft mules, which were described in glowing 
colors and much forensic eloquence. 

There was a second count which charged us with 
intimidating and threatening to do bodily harm to one 
Delancey Marmaduke Paha, to his great pain of mind 
and body. 

It seems that the Kanaka had escaped to the city 
and reported that two Howris (foreigners) had boarded 
his car, and that one took a strong dislike to him from 
the start. This one was a prayer killer and proposed 
to do him to death by certam voudoo incantations. 

It must be explained that no matter how civilized 
a native Hawaiian may become there is always in him 
some remnant of the old barbaric superstition. In the 
old times if a Kanaka was wronged by another the 
wrongee announced that he would pray the wronger to 
death in, say one week or ten days. He, — the prayer 
killer, — went out and built a little shelter in sight of the 
domicile of his victim and went to work, while some of 
his friends held the watch. Almost invariably the 
object of prayer sickened and died within the prescribed 
time. It was merely faith cure reversed. 

This is now believed to be an obsolete custom, 
though back in the interior of the big island of Haiwaii 
it has been successfully accomplished within the last 
few years. The street car driver merely thought that 
Burridge was trying to voodoo him. 

I discovered early in the day that I would have to 
learn to ride if I didn't want to miss a lot of good 
times with poi on the side. 

It is the proper thing to visit the Pali, which is an 
institution located at the end of a seven-mile mountain 
road. The correct way to go is on the upper deck of a 
docile horse. 



When a party of ladies and gentlemen was made 
up for a Pali picnic and we were invited, it was taken 
for granted that my other name was Broncho Bill. I 
hesitated over undeceiving them, for they seemed so 
happy in their delusion. 

I did not feel like telling the ladies that the last 
time I was on a horse was ten years ago in North 
Dakota, and the brute hurled me over his head into an 
alkali slough. My brow was inserted in the mud about 
two feet, which left my anatomy waving in the breeze 
like a stunted two-pronged tree denuded of its leaves 
in the pathetic autumn time. < 

Since then I have often thought I would like to 
get an elephant howda and lash it to my horse before 
I tried it again. 

But the ladies gave me a jar of olives and some 
other plunder to carry because I was su^h a good rider. 

I may as well state that the uncultured natives 
along the line of march complained that the plums 
which they found by the roadside had been spoiled by 
the salt ocean water. 

When the morning of the picnic arrived and I was 
led out to my horse, we looked each other over with 
mutual contempt. He was not a beauty. He was 
not the noble animal of the first readers. He had a 
divorce court temper and more angles than a problem 
in the back part of the geometry. 

The ladies told me to be careful of the olives and 
galloped off. I affected to be busy tightening the 
animal's corset in order to put a little distance between 
us. 

When I first attempted to get on board, the horse 
moved and spoiled the picture, and I found myself 
astride a section of thin Honolulu atmosphere which 
didn't seem substantial enough to bear my weight. I 
finally managed it without the aid of a step ladder and 
we started. Then the infamous beast commenced to 
trot. 

I tried to induce him to keep step with me, but 
he wouldn't do it. When I was going down he jumped 
up and met me. We came together with all the force 
and warmth of old-time friends who had not seen each 
other in years. Thus he played lawn tennis with me — 
and he was an expert — keeping me dancing in the 
breeze for seven long miles. 

I found that he too was affected by Anglo-mania. 
The way to steer was not by hauling on a line in the 
good Yankee fashion, but by pressing the ribbons on 
his neck as they do in Rotten Row. We, the beast 
and I, found ourselves in the track of an oncoming 
street car, and I tried the American system of steering, 
with a touch of Delsarte thrown in as an inducement. 

I didn't know exactly how it happened, but I 
found myself jammed against the car, and it nearly tore 
me aut of the saddle. The next day a bill came in for 
paint which we, the horse and I, had scraped off the 
side. 

The guide books say that the scenery to be viewed 
on the road to the Pali is of unsurpassable magnificence 
and grandeur. I am not in a position to affirm or 
deny. I was too busy keeping my tongue from getting 



A TOY OF A FATEFUL ANGLO-MANIAC HORSE. 



17 



between my teeth, in which event there would be no 
saving it. 

The ladies were very kind to me when they dis- 
covered how I rode, and nearly fell off their horses with 
inward and supressed mirth. 

They worked hard to keep my feelings from being 
lacerated as much as the rest of my person ; but when 
at a distance I heard a snicker like the tearing of 6-cent 
cambric I knew that my equestrianism was the fascin- 
ating theme of the snicker recital. 

We reached the Pali in due course of time and 



lunched without olives. The mountain top was en- 
shrouded in clouds, and one was able to see about three 
feet. 

The view presented was a perfect counterpart of 
that seen in the steam-room of a Turkish bath with 
everything in full blast. Coming down the mountain 
I got a club in the hope I might score something 
against the pounding the horse had given me. He 
skated down in a mighty brief space of time, which 
was the only agreeable feature of the performance. 








CHAPTER V 



American Ideas Prevail — State and Historical Secrets Never Be- 
fore Divulged— The Army of the Queen — Studying for a 
Courtier. 




VERYTHING was Am- 
erican on the Islands 
even long before anexa- 
tion viras considered, 
from the genuine Ameri- 
can French on the hotel 
bills of fare down to the 
Fourth of July, which 
was celebrated during 
royal rule with an ora- 
tion containing the lat- 
est news from Bunker 
Hill, with a brass band, 
a greased pole, and all 
the other accessories for 
the proper development 

of patriotism, including the next morning's case of 

dislocation of the hair. 



In fact, the town is so American that a man keeps 
forgetting that it was ever anything else. The last 
specimen of royalty was Queen Liliuokalani, the sister, 
not the wife — as many suppose— of the late King Kal- 
akaua. There are enough princes and princesses for 
fairy tale purposes, but I did not hear of any dukes and 
lords. It must be remembered that the resources of 
the islands were largely undeveloped, and this must not 
be laid up against a new country struggling along 
on canned corned beef and living on the prospects of a 
boom in the spring. Let us be patient with the Ha- 
waiian Islands and all will be right in time. There 
were a lot of marked-down, fire-sale nobles who were 
elected for life and who met when the legislature did, 
running a side show which corresponds to the English 
body of divorce court stars and swell hoss jockeys 
known as the House of Lords. No one heard very 
much about the Hawaiian House of Nobles, and when 
there I advised it to advertise liberally in the newspa- 
pers for business and have its diamonds stolen or some- 
thing of that sort if it wished to get to the front. The 
violet-eyed modesty of the upper Kanaka house did, in 
its time, give it a mighty low rating in Bradstreets. I 
had always felt an insane desire to josh the nobility, 
but restrained myself when any one was around, for 
there is no telling but that my hack-driver might be a 
noble in disguise, and I would have hated to hurt bis 
feelings. It is hard enough to be a hack-driver. 

A few years ago the Hawaiian monarch was very 
much more of a personage than during the last inning. 



i8 



■riMiiriHillilltiliiti 



ROYALTY ON THE RUN. 



19 



There was a revolution in which old man Prerogative 
got the sawdust kicked out of him. It wasn't much 
of a revolution, as revolutions go, there only being a 
half-dozen men killed, but it worked like a charm. 

The government had been trying to maintain its 
position in society with a constitution which was shiny 
in the seams and bagged in the knees in a way that 
was a burning shame. The King thought it ought to 




The Birth of Constitutional Liberty. 

do until he sold his hogs and could afford another, but 
the populace, which was up to the times, insisted on the 
latest style right away, and didn't want any installment 
payment plan either. The King said he wouldn't have 
it, and both parties clinched on this proposition. Kal- 
akaua returned to the palace, which is in a large gar- 
den, and was at that time surrounded by a fifteen-foot 
wall. He got the family cannon out on the piazza and 
trained it on an adjacent livery stable. I never could 
understand what he had against that institution, but 
possibly he had ridden in one of its hacks. The stand- 
ing army, which was with him on the piazza, was in- 
structed to plug the daylights out of that livery stable, 
and strike a blow in the name of Hawaii and its royal 
ruler. Then the King retired to commence his day's 
work. 

While the proprietor of the stable was chasing 
around like the foreman of an amateur fire com- 
pany, yelling, " It is all a mistake ; my stable don't need 
any ventilating holes shot into it ! " and begging the 
army for heaven's sake to turn the nozzle of the instru- 
ment the other way, a little band of patriots, with their 
shotguns, mounted the roof of the Royal Theater, a 
building across the street from the palace. The situa- 
tion commanded the whole grounds, and when one of 
the army stepped out to fire the gun he was picked 
off by the party on the roof. This act was painful to 
some, but it was jwpular with the masses, and was 
encored until five soldiers were killed. Artillery prac- 
tice then became so unpopular in army circles that it 
was regarded as a bore and temporarily given up. The 



King retired to his private bungalow in the palace yard. 
The insurgents learned this, and they lighted Chinese 
bombs and threw them on the roof of that edifice. 
These bombs are noisier than a labor agitator, and their 
explosion on a tin roof was worse than a band tourna- 
ment. No one can play poker with any degree of com- 
fort under such circumstances, and Kalakaua was very 
much annoyed at it. 

" Ho, varlet ! Tell those folks in the flat above," 
the King absent-mindedly remarked, who was much 
engrossed in his game, " that they must keep their kids 
still or I will see the landlord." 

" But it is the rebels, your Highness, and they are 
letting off fireworks at us." 

" This is no flambeau club, and I want it stopped," 
returned the King in some heat. 

"They won't stop until you sign the new constitu- 
tion, your roy'l highlights." 

"Well, fetch them in. I suppose I might as well 
sign it to get rid of them." Then the minions went out 
and borrowed a poi sign and waved it o'er the palace 
walls. A white flag, it must be explained, is always 
an indication that poi is for sale in this country. 

The spectacle of royalty brought to bay is ever a 
pathetic and interesting one, whatever be the sympa- 
thies of the onlookers. Oliver Cromwell chasing Charles 
I. around a pasture lot with a pair of handcuffs, and 
Louis XIV. trying to dodge a party of vigilantes with 
a rope are to me the most exciting episodes of history, 
and the incident of Kalakaua being made to jump so 
high that his head knocked down the plastering of the 




The Army Swooned. 



ceiling, by a Chinese bomb explosion, is one which 
travels in the same class. 

"Come in, gentlemen," continued Kalakaua, as the 
revolutionary party appeared with a new-laid constitu- 
tion under its arm. "Let's get through with this busi- 



20 



THE BATTLE OF WAIKIKI. 



ness for I have just got the best hand I have held this 
week and I want to see if it is any good." 

The rest was easy. 

"Ah, um," continued the King, stroking his whis- 
kers, " are we all in? Oh, sign the constitution ? Cer- 
tainly, certainly ; in a minute — give me one card — Oh, 




Burridge's Second Battle with the Army. 

yes, yes, where do I sign — here ? Yes — I '11 have to raise 
you I guess — I hope that signature is satisfactory. 
Good day, gentlemen," said the shorn King, picking up 
the hand he had lain down. And thus was constitu- 
tional freedom secured to the Peaceful Isles, which are 
only menaced now by the military, and that usually on 
dark nights. 

During the period of our investigations the Queen 
forced the army on our notice several times. The 
standing army, which, by the way, sat down most of 
the time when folks were not looking, had since the 
days of the revolution been recruited up to its normal 
strength, and counting all the non-commissioned offi- 
cers, brigadier and major generals, numbered in full 
sixty-four. It was composed of Kanaka young men 
who were not fat. Their uniform was of white duck 
with cork helmets. They looked pretty well when not 
trying to toe a chalk line, which, though it was their 
great ambition in life, never quite achieved it. They 
didn't seem to enjoy the work, and in fact most 
of them soldiered their jobs. The Kanaka is all right 
on the score of individual courage, especially when 
there is a little excitement in it. In daring nautical 
deeds he is not excelled, but army discipline makes 
him shudder. 

The major-general was as important as a young 
man who has for the first time been elected a parent by 
a bare eight-pound majority; but he had to walk with 
the rest of the troops. He had the advantage, how- 
ever, of not being obliged to carry anything but his dig- 
nity and an obtuse, cross-cut sword. 

^ We were watching a drill one afternoon and the 
troops did pretty well, considering that they were work- 
ing by the day. They were not more than a minute 
tardy in working off their stint of evolutions. The gen- 
eral gave his orders in Kanaka language without being 



obliged to look on his book of tactics very often. Dur- 
ing the drill, after giving his men orders to take aim, it 
occurred to him that he wanted to smoke. He drew a 
match down the stripe of his trousers, and while he was 
nursing it into action and looking cross-eyed at the end 
of the cigarette in his mouth, the guns in the hands of 
his troop commenced to give out signs of nervous pros- 
tration. The men in the rear ranks with the despair- 
ing calmness of veterans in battle who see the day go- 
ing against them, hoisted the muzzles of their weapons 
on the shoulders of those in front, while the latter, 
without anything for rests, let the guns drop gently to 
the earth. 

An evening or two after this Burridge and I were 
returning from a dinner in a carriage and again met our 
friends, the army, drilling under an arc street light. It 
did most of its work after dark, partially to avoid get- 
ting tanned by the sunshine and partially because the 
army looks better in the dark, and can chew tobacco 
while it drills without getting caught. As we passed 
it Burridge, in that frolicsome way of his which kept 
me continually sending our regrets to the police, stuck 
his head out of the hack and yelled at the soldiers. His 
shriek was like the fortissimo finale of a cat fight with 
all the stops pulled out. It was like a convulsion of 
nature when a new geological epoch is started. The 
citizens in that ward of Honolulu got out of their beds 
thinking a new brand of earthquake had struck town. 

The effect on the army was electrical, as the pat- 
ent medicine advertisements say. At the time Bur- 




Jones as a Courtier." 



ridge caroled his roundelay the troops were in the mid- 
dle of a comic opera evolution and consisted of a line 
of soldiers twenty long and two deep. The first line 
heard the noise first, naturally, and swooned in the 
arms of the second line. This was the only maneuver I 
ever saw them perform with anything like unity of pur- 
pose and uniformity of action. 



LEARNING THE COURTIER TRADE. 



21 



A few evenings later another little incident hap- 
pened which might have resulted in grave international 
complications. We were coming into town on a tram 
car and suddenly came upon the army again. It was 
occupying the street-car track practicing on the "West 
Point Glide" or something of the sort. The driver 
ground the crank and stopped. This infuriated Bur- 
ridge, who, intoxicated by victory and emboldened by 
by his Napoleonic success as a tonic sol fa warrior, 
ostentatiously unscrewed the car. Whereat the 
general commanding planted himself in front of the 
mule and drew a long revolver which he pointed at the 
animal. This made Burridge thoughtful and he paused 
and looked at the Kanaka. He kept his yell in re- 
serve, should firing be commenced, and with great pres- 
ence of mind remarked : " Get out of the way, you 
Pullman car porter, or I'll run over you. Git up, mule !" 
Then the car started and the general stepped aside. In 
commenting on this incident the Honolulu Evening 
Bulletin suggested that for the safety of the populace 
it had better be made a misdemeanor punishable by 
fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court, 
for the standing army to carry firearms, or else it ought 
to be put under bonds to keep the peace. The Ha- 
waiian army was a joke, and most people there grinned 
when they referred to it. But it was a necessary ad- 
junct to royalty and lasted as long as royalty did. 



The deposed Queen was very dignified and very 
punctillious in all matters of court etiquette. Like the 
tram cars and the horses of the community, she had 
Anglomania also, and worked her court on the English 
plan. During our visit she was in official mourning 
for her husband, the late John O. Dominis, an ex- Amer- 
ican, It is not easy to be a queen, and she had to 
mourn according to the statute in such cases made and 
provided. Her time was nearly up, and she wept by 
law with one eye and watched the clock with the other. 
She didn't see company while her nose was red with 
grief, and that was why I was not presented to her. 
I rather expected to, and worked hard getting posted 
up on court etiquette. I practiced walking backward 
with a firm and confident air, which was somewhat 
marred by Burridge placing footstools and boots where 
I could hit them. He was anxious to have me perfect 
in my circus act, so that I could step on a royal poodle 
dog with sang froid, and not betray any plebeian Chi- 
cago breeding by sitting down on him. I was warned, 
if I stayed to tea, not to compliment the old lady on 
the rise of the biscuits or the cut of her preserves, for 
she probably would be as surprised at them as I might 
be. Now it is everlastingly too late. There is no hope 
of using the information and behavior on her that I so 
painfully acquired. 



.^ 



^M 



'^^^^ 




iHEJioNOLULU 

--"Water It^onj. 



CHAPTER VI 



Down the Islands— Wrenched Apart from Honolulu— Victims of 
the Lai Habit — A Dash of Geography — Landing Human 
Freight. 




HE volcano of Kilauea 
— pronounced Kill- 
away-ah — is the ob- 
jective point of most 
tourists who visit the 
islands. There are two 
ways of getting there 
from Honolulu — one 
by the Wilder Steamer 
Company, which trav- 
els down the windward side of the islands, and the 
Inter-island Company, which operates on the opposite 
side. It involves a trip of two days steaming and one 
day horse-backing to reach the volcano, and however 
one may make it, the trip is fraught with more variety 
and incident than the job of taking nine small children 
to the circus at one time. 

The first hard work is for a fellow to wrench him- 
self apart from Honolulu. If he made any friends 
among the hospitable people of the town, and it is his 
fault if he hasn't, they are all down to the wharf to see 
him off and to give him advice on how to take a fall 
out of that noted athlete, M. Mai de Mer — the reme- 



dies recommended ranging from lime juice to suicide. 

There is another very pretty and poetic custom 
that the Honolulu people have adopted from the na- 
tive Kanakas at the same time they adopted their land 
and other trifles. This is the custom of decorating de- 
parting friends with wreaths of flowers, spelled lats and 
pronounced " lays." 

One cf ths most picturesque sights of the city is a 
sidewalk flower market, where native women sit on the 
ground and string ginger and other flowers and mili 
leaves to sell to those who have friends about to de- 
part. 

After the lines have been cast off and the voyage 
has actually commenced the decorated tourist tears off 
handfuls of the flowers and throws them on the wharf, 
when they are scrabbled for by the original donors. 
These sprigs of mili are then cherished religiously until 
the absent one returns. 

This custom, when tried on tender strangers like 
ourselves, and the full force of the pathos of it striking 
in, is more likely than not to create a feeling of sadness. 

Burridge and I, of course, came in for decoration. 
Our private flower mission did nobly, and we wouldn't 
have been treated better had we been convicted mur- 
derers in an American jail. 

I was festooned with lais until all I needed was a 
toy monkey on a stick thrust into my umbrageous 
whiskers and a few wax candles to be a first-class 
Christmas tree. Burridge looked like a popular prize- 
fighter's funeral. 

Then when the bell rang we leaned up against the 
rail and sobbed convulsively in concert. It is the cor- 
rect .thing to do in this happy land of sentiment, flow- 
ers and poi. At home it might be considered unmaid- 
enly to give way to grief before a large and critical 
audience, but it is different there. 

As the steamer Claudine moved slowly out from 



22 



^m 



» 



,^-_g^ 



"ll 



THE SAIL DOWN THE ISLANDS. 



23 



the wharf what first appeared to be a number of float- 
ing cocoanuts bobbed up in the water below. They 
were the heads of young Kanakas who were there to 
dive for any silver coin which the passengers might 
throw them. 

As soon as Burridge understood this he stopped 
snorting on my shoulder long enough to extract from 




Shedding a Parting Tear. 



me all the small change I had in my clothes, and in his 
generous, free-hearted way chucked it overboard to the 
boys, while my lamentations took on a new fervor and 
a deeper meaning. 

And so we started for the South, with the band 
playing, handkerchiefs fluttering, hats waving, cries of 
"Ahoha, good-by," shouted across the water, and a be- 
lated Chinaman fanned the atmosphere with an unre- 
ceipted wash-bill, crying out for 75 cents or revenge, 
while Burridge and I tried to assure him across thirty 
fathoms of deep ocean that were good for even twice 
that amount on our return. 

There are five large islands and three or four 
smaller ones lying in a procession from the northwest 
to the southeast, about as irregularly as the Kanaka 
soldiery on dress parade. 

Counting from the north, the first one is Kaui, the 
second, on which Honolulu is located, is Oahu — pro- 
nounced like the substitute of a cuss word when your 
corn is trodden on in polite society — then comes Mo- 
lokai, the island upon which the lepers are sequestered ; 
Maui fourth, and the big and comparatively new island 
Hawaii last. 

All are mountainous and rugged, being of volcanic 



origin, but it is on the latter that the intrepid tourist 
tracks the active, untamed volcano to its jungle lair. 

From Honolulu to Hilo, the main port of Hawaii, 
is about 250 miles. Frequent stops along the coast to 
discharge Chinamen and natives and take on sugar 
spins the trip out to a two-days' run, though it is fre- 
quently made in shorter time. The steamers are com- 
fortable, being in matters of appointment, accommoda- 
tions, food and service about like the average lake pro- 
peller. There is something of a steam-barge rig 
adopted, however, an open deck space being left for- 
ward to accommodate freight, which is the chief source 
of revenue. 

The sail down the windward side of Hawaii is 
grandly picturesque. Beetling cliffs rise above the 
steamer to a height of one and two thousand feet, cov- 
ered with creeping vines and tropical verdure, while 
peeping over the top are the cane-fields, looking for all 
the world at that distance like Illinois com. 

Back of the cliffs rise the snowclad peaks of Mauna 
Loi and Mauna Kea to a hight of nearly i 5,000 feet. 
Snow and rain fed mountain torrents tear down the 
sides of Loa, and reaching the precipice plunge over, 
one or two thousand feet, into the sea. In a morning's 
sail we passed ninety-eight beautiful cataracts. 

The steamer was riding the big Pacific swells which 
rolled in on the rocks and broke in yeasty foam. The 
scene was magnificent beyond the power of language 




Lamb Tongue's Wash Bill. 

to describe, and Burridge 's artistic soul was so moved 
that he got out of his bunk and borrowed my kodak 
plug, which he rammed down his throat to keep his 
breakfast corralled, and went on deck to enjoy the 
beauties of nature. 



24 



LANDING HUMAN FREIGHT. 



There are no ports worthy of the name on the 
islands except at Honolulu and Hilo. It was there- 
fore necessary to anchor the ship and do business with 
the shore by means of whale boats or freight boats 
built on whale boat models. It is in this kind of work 
that the native Kanaka is in his glory. 

While the anchor cable is yet rattling in the hawse- 
hole the native deck hands lower away the whale boats, 









The Timid Freak. 

no matter how high the sea may be running. This in- 
volves acrobatics of the monkey order, but it is as fin- 
ished and graceful as the finest circus performance. But 
the Kanaka must talk and yell at his work, and it is 
carried on with a wealth of wasted conversation rarely 
heard outside a sewing circle under stress of excitement 
over the arrival of a new minister. 

If there is something to be done and there is only 
one native to do it he will give himself the order in a 
loud and abusive tone of voice, acting in the capacity 
of second mate, and then as a plain A. B. seaman he 
will answer back and grudgingly obey, using back talk 
just within the lines of mutiny. 

There are usually three or tour boats at work, 
with six or eight men in each, all shouting like election 
niglit, and added to this are two or three outside boats 
from shore engaged in a polyglot yell recital in compe- 
tition with the regular talent. It is a great place for 
deaf people. 

Large numbers of steerage passengers are carried 
•^Kanakas, Chinamen, Japanese and Portugese, the 



three latter nationalities being plantation laborers, 
brought there under long-time contracts. 

The debarkation of these when there is a sea run- 
ning forms a scene which is highly diverting when 
viewed, from the upper deck. The passenger climbs 
down the companion ladder and stands on the lower 
step. If the waves are big enough, one moment he is 
ten feet in the air and at the next he is water up to 
his knees. The whale boat is dancing in the vicinity 
like a man who has just sat down on the old home- 
stead of a family of little busy hornets. When the 
boat nears the ladder about forty people yell "jump," 
and it is the passenger's business to shut his eyes and 
obey orders. ^ 

I went ashore at nearly every landing and learned 
that it was best to pick out a large, fat Kanaka and 
fearlessly leap into his soft, feather-bed anatomy. It 
was pleasanter for me, but it made big, ragged dents in 
the Kanaka. 

One of the most exciting sights of the trip was 
the unloading of a female native who weighed 300 
pounds if she weighed an ounce. She got down the 
steps with her baggage, which was promptly wrested 
from her and thrown into the whale boat. Then it 




Umbrellas with the Soup. 

swung up under the ladder for an instant, and every 
one shrieked "Let go !" but the old girl was timid and 
clung to the ropes. A second and a third time was 
the boat swung up to her, and she still feared to make 
the plunge. Then four of the boat's crew leaped on the 
ladder like big apes. One pounded her hands to 
loosen her grip, and the others seized her, and the 
deadly struggle began. It was like the hottest kind 



mriMiiii 



''BEAUTIFUL HILO'' AND ITS GLORY. 



25 



of a foot-ball rush. She was so fat that she was elas- 
tic, and was distorted by the pulling like an inflated 
rubber doll. 

Everybody yelled. 

At the brief instant when the boat was under the 
ladder the shapeless mass of Kanaka humanity fell off, 
struck the rail, and rolled to the bottom. The deck 
hand who acted as basement to the human haystack 
was dragged out and laid on some freight forward, so 
that he could get fresh air, while a kind friend shaped 
up his flattened ribs. 

The Chinese laborers travel under the misfortune 
of not knowing either English or Kanaka. If they are 
new importations they have not learned the advisabil- 
ity of festooning their cues about their heads. 

They are naturally a little backward over getting 
ashore, not having been brought up to an aquatic cir- 
cus. If John hesitates, which he usually does, he is 
lost — doubly lost. 

A sailor will leap from the rail to the ladder, grab 
the cue, and at the critical moment pass the end to 
a colleague in the boat. Then the hands "walk away 
with the slack " and John has to come, and he does 
come away from his fastenings with a rush. He may 
go overboard, but he is perfectly safe if his hair is 
planted in firmly. 

These methods of debarkation do not apply to 
lady cabin passengers. They are placed in the boats 
and lowered by a steam winch, lighting on the water 
as easily as a sea gull. 

We left Honolulu one noon and reached the ter- 
minal port of Hilo the forenoon of the third day. 

It is a typical town of the tropics, lying on a bay, 
with a mountainous background. The islanders, when 
they have the energy, call it " beautiful Hilo," and the 
adjective is no misfit. 

The business street parallels the horse-shoe of the 



bay, as in most of the island settlements. Untold 
millions of dollars worth of sugar has been shipped from 
Hilo, and yet there is not a sidewalk in the place. 

The architects have builded with the fear of earth- 
quakes before them, and the low building are almost 
universally embowered in tropical foliage of the richest 
kind. The soil is so prolific and the greenery so virile 
and of such spontaneous growth that when theHiloan 
cultivates his garden he merely takes an ax and chops 
down that which he doesn't want. 

There is a population of 2,000 or 3,000, a small 
but cultured American contingent being the dominant 
element. Hilo's glory is its rain, the annual fall being 
fifteen feet and some inches. We were in the place 
three days and caught about twenty minutes of sun- 
shine in that time. The first thirty hours of our stay 
the rainfall measured 12^ inches. W'hen it is raining 
its hardest there a citizen doesn't dare go out with a 
cork life preserver on for fear he will be carried upward. 

Our second dinner in the place was eaten under 
umbrellas, although there was an apparently good roof 
and we were on the ground floor of a two-story build- 
ing. We procured slickers and paddled around in a 
gay, amphibious way with the hospitable inhabitants. 

On one social occasion we were projected into the 
regular road-agent brand of church fair, with all the 
ensnaring pitfalls of the States. It was held at high 
noon and was a great success, a large amount of booty 
being realized to build an awning to protect the in- 
fant class not from the rain but from the sun. 

The sun is seen so infrequently that I suppose the 
occasional sight of it terrified the infants. 

We eventually got tired waiting for it to clear up, 
organized our caravan, and started on a thirty-mile 
ride up the mountains to Kilauea with light hearts and 
dripping whiskers. 





CHAPTER VII. 



The Ride Up the Mountains — Molasses Candy Scenery — Fifteen 
Miles Over a Lava Flow — Lost — The Dead Kanaka. 




E started for the vol- 
cano of Kilauea, 
Burridge on a sleek 
and knowing mule 
with a woven wire 
mattress back, and 
I on a white medie- 
val got hie horse 
with a mighty- 
slanting roof and a 
knobby ridge pole. 
We had planned to 
leave Hilo at day- 
Hght, but the spell 

of the country was upon us and lO o'clock rolled 

around before we got on our way. 



26 



"We," in this instance, consisted of my artistic 
companion, myself, a guide so-called, and his first as- 
sistant tail-twister, who rode behind and massaged the 
two pack mules with a club. 

Once out of the beautiful old town, with its pic- 
turesque buildings and luxuriant foliage, we struck 
sugar-cane fields, which extended a few miles only. 

The road for fifteen miles was as fine a country 
driveway as can be found anywhere, and is being con- 
structed by the government of scoria and volcanic sand, 
affording a bed nearly as good as asphaltum. It will 
be finished shortly, and one can then travel from Hilo 
to the volcano in a carriage. The way led across a 
river or two, a mountain torrent, by tumble-down, moss- 
grown native huts and through stretches of hothouse 
jungle full of gigantic reeds, and creeping vines, the 
tropical trees so strange to Northern eyes picked out 
with spots of violent, dazzling crimson. Then a sketch 
of open in which there were coffee plantations and ban- 
anas growing wild. 

More forest less tropical in character, for the 
ascent, though so gradual as to be unmarked, had been 
a material one and the air was perceptibly cooler. The 
woods thinned as we went on and settlements became 
sparser. 

At the last plantation we jumped a ditch and sit- 
ting on the horses robbed an orange orchard, but looked 
in vain for the old granger to appear with a musket 
and a bull-dog. Some one watched us from a distance 
and never even yelled. 

Robbery on the islands hasn't an5'^thing like the 



CLIMBING MAUN A KEA. 



27 



movement and wild joy in it that it has in the States. 
Personally I prefer the style of crime that is in vogue in 
Illinois, where we get our fruit a la dead rush with rock- 
salt on the side. 

A gallop of a mile or two more brought us to a 
dense stretch of woods, sub-tropical in character, in 
which the carriage road terminated. Here when lunch 
was concluded, we struck out on the bridle trail, leaving 
the guides in the rear to battle along with the reluc- 
tant pack mules. 

The ascent, when we left the woods, became more 
apparent, and the trail for the rest of the ride — some 
fifteen miles — was over a comparatively recent — speak- 
ing geologically — lava flow. It was so obcure in 
places that we needed a first-class Indian in our busi- 
ness a good deal of the time. 




The Caravan En Route. 



The wall of forest grew dim in the misty air, and 
we entered upon a world of ferns which stretched away, 
coarse and rank, into the narrow horizon on three sides. 
There were a hundred varieties, the most conspicuous 
being the tree fern, which grows a trunk for itself six 
and eight feet high, the leaves, which are large enough 
to be called branches, extending from the top like palm 
trees making a gigantic umbrella under which a man 
may drive on horseback. When the ferns thinned out 
the bare lava showed black and brown under the 
green . 

As we progressed the rock gradually predomin- 
ated. Imagine a slooping sea ot soap-bubbles, each 
ten, twenty, thirty feet in diameter, solidified, and 
many cracked across the top, with ferns and foliage 
issuing from the crevices. Or better, imagine a lands- 



cape composed of burned molasses candy cooled so as 
to present a surface rough and ragged with its torturous 
serpentine shapes intact, all covered with stove polish 
and with a fringe of foilage issuing from cracks and 
cavities. 

It was over this our trail lay, and our animals 
threaded their ways single file, up and down, to right 
and left, with all the dainty care of egg-dancers. 

The rumble of subterranean waters frequently 
reached our ears. The horses' hoofs every few rods 
gave back hollow sounds indicating the titanic bubbles, 
on which we were, had a mighty thin crust. 

Of course we got lost. Waiting for the guides to 
come up was out of the question, for they hardly 
expected when we left them to make the Volcano 
House that night. 

Darkness was only an hour away, and it was com- 
mencing to rain. We began to realize that it was no 
joke to get mislaid in a country where there was no 
"Lost and Found" want column in which to advertise 
for ourselves, when we spied a Kanaka grass hut on a 
hilltop some distance away. 

It was like a large shed with each end inclosed, 
the middle consisting of a sort of open hall. 

I dashed up the hill while Burridge sat on his horse 
with an umbrella raised, warbling a few wild notes. 
His selection apropos of our situation was the one en- 
titled " He Never Came Back." When I reached the 
hut and slid from the back of Cathedral there was no 
sign of life. 

I started to enter for investigation and came on 
the body of a dead Kanaka man, clad in white from 
head to foot, and lying on a low dais in the hall. It 
was something of a shock. Presently several small 
children, big-eyed and shy, appeared one after the other. 
One of the eldest could talk a little EngHsh. 

It was their father, she said who died that morn- 
ing. Her mother had fixed the body for burial and had 
gone off to the neighbors to drum up a funeral. No, 
we couldn't do anything for them unless we should 
meet any natives and then we might tell them, if we 
pleased. 

The dreariness and the loneliness of it was some- 
thing appalling. 

We pushed on to avoid a night in the rain on the 
mountainside. Our orders had been to "hammer the 
horses" every time we struck a piece of level trail a 
rod or more long. They were not hammered to any 
serious extent, although we obeyed orders implicitly. 

The rain soon came down with the regular Hilo 
movement, and we had to fix up for it. Burridge clad 
himself in a pommel slicker — a yellow oil-skin coat of 
the mother hubbard order architecture, which covered 
most of the horse, as well as himself. At a little dis- 
tance the combination looked like a rat lugging off a 
canvas-covered ham. 

More preciptous climbing through tangled foliage. 
The way was frequently barred by spiders which had 
run webs across the trail like kite strings. The spiders 
themselves look like soft shell crabs, but they are not 
poisonous. 



28 



THE VOLCANO REACHED. 



There is nothing in the fauna or flora of the island 
which is so, except the national beverage — gin. 

Just as night was closing in we reached a good 
road which indicated that the Volcano House was but 
a mile distant. The annimals knew that there were 
oats at the end of it. We called in our unnbrellas and 
tore over the home- stretch with a John Gilpin action 
and reached the hotel under the bright glare of the 
volcano. 

Here we were comfortably housed and found it a 



first-class summer resort hotel and something of a sur- 
prise, considering its insolated, not to say exclusive, 
position in the world. 

That is to say it looked like a summer resort hotel, 
but it was different in that one could get the comforts 
of life without being obliged to raise money by a chattel 
mortgage on the baby to satisfy a rapacious landlord. 
Beer, however, was 75 cents a drink. It was that which 
most forciably suggested the resort idea. I think a blue 
ribbon movement would succeed first rate there. 



,^ 



^Q.^ 



^^ 



itmUm 




Jl—ft t I 






'■^-■•■'^ , 






"Ji-ie Vo L C A N O ]"f O 



ti^& 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The Secret of the Volcano,— The Hated School Marm and 
Hand-Me-Down Educational Facts.— The Truth now- 
first Told and the Secret Divulged. 



the 




HERE is one school marm 
whom I have remembered 
for the past quarter of a 
century with a sort of 
smouldering hatred, I 
think I was about 7 years 
of age when she shot 
,wp_,:_„_., . \ \«* athwart my small hori- 

/ W/\ V l\ \\W ^°"' ^^^ ^^'^^ ^^^ ^^^^ 
I InA W \ \\. \ \M in a big bag of netting, 

for it was a few years after 
the war. I don't think I 
hated her for that, but 
more because of the mis- 
sionary spirit which raged within her. 

She seemed to want to assist me to narrowly 
escape the gallows. This involved keeping me in after 
school to either make me re-learn a geography lesson 
that I knew by heart except when called upon to recite 
or to administer certain reproofs which I seemed to 
need. 

At a certain stage of the reproving process she 
used to weep on the top of my head and tell me how 
much it hurt her to punish me. 



That I regarded as a worse lie than I could even 
manage myself 

I was pretty cheerful when the weeping com- 
menced, for I knew that from five to seven minutes 
from date I would be let out, not, however, before I 
kissed her good night. Her mouth was like a slit cut 
in pie crust. Strange to say, this kissing annoyed me 
very much, and I wasn't easy until I ran out and ex- 
pectorated and polished my lips with my coat sleeve. 
She habitually wore on her otherswise pale cheek 
a drug store flush, and one night when I had repented 
of my crimes to the Queen's taste and she put down her 
corned beef lips for a kiss I stood on tiptoe and reached 
for that flush with a willowy, Hssome moist tongue like 
a cow after a choice mouthful outside the pasture fence. 

When I got out I was the envy of all the little 
boys because I could spit red. 

This ended the kissing part of my education, 
which was short but bitter. I remember her most 
vividly, however, in connection with volcanoes, and her 
efforts to teach me something about them. The aver- 
age round was fought out about like this : 

" Now, Connie, you may answer. What is a vol- 
cano ?" 

"A volcano is — is — is — ^A volcano is — is — is — " 
Very long pause. 

" A volcano is a mount — Can't you finish it ? " 

" Yessum. A volcano is a mount." 

" Go on — tain — mountain." 

" Oh, yes, I forgot. A volcano is a moun-tain." 
Strong emphasis on the "tain," 

" Which," continued the teacher persuasively. 

" Which," I promptly responded. 

" Now, Connie, what does it do ? Don't you 
know ?" 

" It does — It doe-s — does — I know, but I can't 
think just now what it does. It does sumpthin'." 

"Yes, it does something. It belches forth — now, 
what four things does it belch forth .? " 



29 



30 



A BLOW AT 



GEOGRAPHIES. 






Whet*^ tfitTouNsij SAttd- , .f 




/ f \ 

The Secret Exposed. 



" It belches forth four things " said I, closely fol- 
lowing the hot trail. 

"But what four things?" Long pause again. 
Teacher sweetly asks again, "what four things?" 
Happy thought strikes me. 

"Tar, pitch, turpentine an' lumber !" 

" Oh, dear no, ! They are chief products of North 
Carohna. Now what four things does the volcano 




What is a Volcano?' 



belch forth. Just think" As if my poor hair wasn't 
getting loose at the roots with thought. She prompted 
me again. 

■' Fi-f-f-f — " and she made a noise like a mad cat, 
" Fi-f-f." 



" Figs ! " Trumplantly. 

"Oh no, no. What warms you and cooks your 
vituals?" 

" Ma does." This came doubtfully, for I didn't 
really believe my mother had been shot out of a moun- 
tain or she would have told me about it. 

The answer seemed to discourage the good school 
marm and she said shortly : "It belches forth fire, lava, 
smoke and mud composed of ashes and hot water; now 
repeat it and begin at the beginning. 

Then I answered in a loud and confident voice 
which diminished into nothingness before the sentence 
was finished : 

" A volcano is a mountain what belts forth fire an' 
laughter an' smoke an' — an' — oh yes, an' mud, an' — an' 
that's all." 

I thought of that school marm and. her hand-me- 
down volcano information and how she used to send 
me to my seat when I forgot the mud, as I crawled 
out of a chilly morning. 

I thought of her as I stood by the window, and 
gazed out over the many miles of lava waste and 
chased an erring gallus down my back. I thought of 
her as I tore around with an eye full of soap looking 
for a towel which my artistic partner has not used 
for a paint rag. 

I wished she were there so that I could vindicate 
my recitation of the fall of 1 867 and show her that I 
was perfectly justified in forgetting the mud. 

In fact, Kilauea is enough to put the whole brood 
of geography architects to the blush. My confidence 
in them is mangled and bruised. My volcanic ideal, 
based upon Mr. Colton's once-popular work, is a tot- 
tering wreck. There is no mistake about Kilauea be- 
ing the most prominent and enterprising of all the vol- 
canoes on earth, and is the only one which never takes 
a vacation or shuts up for repairs and while Kilauea is 
on the side of a mountain — Mona Loa — it is of itself 
a big hole in the ground. 

I think it will take a diagram to give an adequate 
idea of its size, shape, and commercial standing. It 



mtamaa 



■Hlii 



THE VOLCANO AT WORK. 



31 



will be seen that the volcano house is located on the 
brow of an ex-cliff, 800 feet high; that is to say, the 
cliff has fallen in at this point in times past, and the 
rock has disintegrated enough to make a soil sufficient 
to support verdure and good-sized trees. 

Down this slope runs a mountain path. It is a 

mile long, going down, and about five coming up. 

■ From the point where this path strikes the lava floor 




Chasing the Erring Gallus. 

to the pit which contains the molten lake is two miles 
and a half 

This lava floor, which from the hotel looks as 
smooth as an asphaltum walk, is in reality like Lake 
Michigan might be with the wildest cross-chop sea that 
was ever kicked up, solidified at the instant when it 
was at its height, and additionally cut and scarred by 
seams and big crevasses. 

The tourist on his first visit requires a guide to 
conduct him to the liquid lake, for while the trail is 
much traveled, it is over rock, and therefore difficult for 
a novice to keep, but Mr. Lee, of the Volcano House, 
has recently set up a line of land-marks, which make it 
easy to follow on the second and subsequent trips, or 
after <"he way has once been pointed out. 

We made several trips to the lake and I sat down 
and let my feet dangle over the edge and tried to think 
up a lot of hard names to call the angry red sea below 
me. I gave it up with a headache. I think that no 
one but a Hardshell Baptist preacher could do the sub- 
ject justice offhand. 



Speaking of that denomination, right there on the 
brink is the finest site for a chapel in the world. It is 
hard to believe but even Burridge expressed his inten- 
tion of joining the church when he got home. 

However, there seems to have been some visitors 
who were not awed into decent behavior. I refer to 
the abandoned advertising fiends who write their names 
on rocks. 

To toil for hours over the lava and come on a big 
rock facing the volcano, on which is the pertinent ad- 
vice, " Use Sudd's soap for eruptions," strikes one as 
bordering on contempt of court. Ben Hogan, some- 
what known in America who did quite a lively business 
in Honolulu as a professional "exwickedest man in the 
world," as his bills stated, left his ad, which is a seven- 
column display, done in white paint on the cold brow 
of a rock. 

Privately I think this was his culminating crime, 
and he needs to be reformed once more with a base- 
ball bat. I had a chance to tell him what I thought 
about it and did so in no uncertain language. 




Bound for the Brink. 

I first however, took the precaution to put some 
distance and a small cliff between us, merely by way of 
giving myself time to apologize should he show symp- 
toms of back-sliding into pugilism again. 

These name-writing idiots keep Landlord Lee very 
busy chasing over the country with a pot of tar and a 
whitewash brush obliterating the little lO-cent bids for 
glory and immortality. 




CHAPTER IX. 



The Molten Lava Lake — Confidenced Again. 




vate 



HEY had me scared in Honolulu. 
Whenever I got to talking about 
the then prospective trip to the 
volcano my friends commenced 
to eye those rare exotics, my 
feet. This made me feel coy 
and shrinking below the knees, 
and I toed in and modestly tried 
to hide them behind the furni- 
ture. 
But this seemingly public interest in a strictly pri- 
affair was merely the preliminary to the question, 



BUF{UlHb LAKE" OF I^ILflUfA 



"How are you fixed for extra shoes? The lava, you 
know, wears one's shoes out like a file. You had bet- 
ter get an extra pair." 

I heard this so frequently, from disinterested people . 
who could have no interest in the shoe and leather 
trade of the islands, that I got in a sort of a panic, and 
toward the last they had me on the run. 

I figured on being at the volcano some weeks and I 
calculated to make a trip every day or two, and each 
trip was to eat up one pair of shoes at the least. 

I started in buying cheap canvas and baseball shoes 
in the Chinese quarter. Then I went up a notch and 
bought those mulatto shoes that tourists affect. 

The shoe buying raged with great virulence and I 
got so that I could purchase footwear in the off-hand, 
careless manner of a cornless millionaire. They even 
got up a story that there was a revolution on foot and 
that I was a purchasing agent trying to divert sus- 
picion by fitting out the army one pair at a time. 

When we reached Hilo solicitous friends again urged 
on me the necessity of providing myself with more 
shoes. 

They looked at my stock and laughed to scorn the 
dude product of Honolulu. What I wanted was 
brogans that would stand the terrific wear of the lava. 

Visions of myself walking on jagged rocks like 
Washington's army at Valley Forge, with about an 



32 



jsgaim 



MB 



^ 



THE MOLTEN LAVA LAKE. 



33 



inch of flesh gnawed from the soles of my feet and 
with the bones sticking out in places, like the nuts in 
peanut candy, impelled me to load a pack mule to the 
limit with footgear entirely devoid of culture and re- 
finement, but which they informed me was just the 
thing for leaping from crag to crag like the nimble 
gazelle. 

After making my first trip to the burning lake I 
solemnly swore that I would jump in before I would 
follow any more friendly advice. 




Her Shoes Were Protected. 

I always had a kind of contempt for the stuff, but 
the trip confirmed my worst suspicions. 

Thenext time I want advice I will go to some pop- 
ular asylum and get it from the inmates of the incur- 
able ward. 

I started out loaded to the guards with shoes, but 
wearing an old Chicago pair. I tramped around shud- 
dering at every leap lest the soles should come away 
from the uppers and expose my bunion to the critical 
gaze of a cold world. 

I was surprised when I got back to perceive that my 
shoes were with me yet, and my surprise was mingled 
with pain when I remembered the gunnysack full of 
footwear on hand, for which I was doomed thenceforth 
to put up excess baggage charges. I made a number 
of trips, wore the same shoes and kept my bankrupt 
stock in the woodshed. 

I wasn't the only one on whom the shoe dealers 



danced with ghoulish glee. The other conspicuous 
martyr was a young lady from San Francisco. 

She drew a pair of stockings over her shoes and then 
put on a pair of rubbers, a pair of her mother's stock- 
ings and a pair of her mother's goloshes, and then en- 
swathed the whole in the gaudy remains of a bed 
quilt. 

She walked down to the crater amid great excite- 
ment on account of the disguise, but became disgusted 
because the rest of our feet didn't bleed like a minority 
stockholder, and left the pile of hosiery and etceteras 
on the brink as a monument and a warning. 

The regulation tourist making a quick trip usually 
arrives in the atternoon, takes a hasty lunch, and in 
company with guides makes the walk to the lake be- 
fore dark, staying there until the shadows of night 
thicken enough to get all the effect of the fiery vision, 
which, with the darkness as a foil, is intensified ten- 
fold. 

After the visitor has looked until his eyes ache and 
his head reels, he is led back to the volcano house by 
the light of lanterns, where a sumptuous dinner awaits 
him. 




Swearing Off on Friendly Advice. 

This is the regular thing, though I was the humble 
instrument of adding a little to the picturesqueness of 
the trip. It was this way: Out on the cliff at the side 
of the hotel was a drying yard in which there was a 



34 



CONFIDENCED AGAIN. 



clothes line that had strung along on it a number of affects every one differently. The "descriptive writer" 
those patent pinching clothes pins. is an animal who wanderes down there with confidence 

One morning a traveler from a place they call En- born of inexperience and the chances are that his grip 



gland, approached and asked me if I would have the 
keyndness to infowm him what those curious instru- 
ments were for. 




The Human Guide- Book at Work. . 

"Why, certainly," I responded in my best Cook's 
tourist guide style. "Those little instruments are 
anti-inhalers. " 

"And, pray, what may that be?" 

"You will find when you go down to the lake to- 
day," said I, "that the smell of sulphur fumes is very 
offensive and sometimes overpowering. These little 
instruments are designed to wear on the nose during 
the trip and prevent the odor making you sick. I 
would advise you to be sure and wear one or you may 
regret it." 

" Really? It's very 'strawdn'ry." 

"Yes, these are placed out here to air and so that the 
tourists can pluck them off the line on their way to 
the lake. It's very thoughtful of the management, I 
think." 

He picked out a good stiff one and gave it to his 
valet to wash. 

Two or three hours later I saw him at the crater 
with his pin on his nose giving out enthusiastic testi- 
monials as to the efficacy and general reach of the vol- 
cano in a loud nasal tone of voice. 

No two people when they return ever agreed upon 
the account of whaj: they saw. 

It seems to be a peculiarity of the volcano that it 



sack full of stock adjectives shrivel and wilt in the 
glare of Hawaii's pet wonder. 

In the Volcano House is a visitors' book. 

It is a cross between a hotel register and an auto- 
graph album. Tourists are wont to inscribe therein 
their feelings and impressions. 

Many of them in a spasm of ecstasy over the hotel's - 
noted "nice ohelo berry pie" eulogize it and forget the 
volcano; and most of them merely advertise their men- 
tal incapacity in this awful book. 

The " descriptive writer " has rioted in its pages, 
but the only one who has in the remotest way ap- 
proached the heights and depths of the subject left the 
following in the volume: 

"Visited the volcano. It looks like hell. — ^John T. 
White." 

In the face of such descriptive powers I feel timid 
about trying to convey an idea of the fearful pit. 

After the theoretical shoe-destroyingwalk the tour- 
ist reaches the edge of the lake and stands behind a 
rampart of lava rock. 

The cliffs go down sheer about 400 feet. Near the 
bottom is a ledge, which narrows the liquid part of the 
lake somewhat without detracting from the grandeur 
of the sight, for this big well is a half mile in diameter, 
though it looks much smaller. 




"Enthusiastic Nasal Testimonials." 

The liquid lava, on exposure to the air, quickly hard- 
ens into a thin dark purple crust, bordering upon black. 
Then cracks come in it like forked lightning against an 
inky sky. 

These cracks widen and extend themselves until the 
surface of the lake is a network of red and white 
seams, separating the dark islands of lava, which have 
the identical form of ice cakes in a spring break-up. 



ii^liiHHli 



THE FLICKERING LIGHT. 



35 



Usually at or near the center muffled explosions 
occur every few seconds. A ghastly white fountain 
flings itself in the air, turns red and falls back on the 
commotion at the surface. 

It is toward these explosive points that the lava 
cakes tend; they can not be said to flow for the move- 
ment is sluggish and as relentless as it is sluggish. 

The pieces of lava cakes crowd each other in a 
horribly deliberate way and their edges are made 
jagged and curl up in the crowding. 

They eat each other, some are torn and cracked 
and disappear under the liquid red, but always with a 
decorous slowness that somehow suggests untold re- 
served power. Occasionally an explosion of gas oc- 
curs under a cake and it is lifted like wet brown paper 
thrown by a tired arm. It may strike the perpendicu 
lar side of the ledge and there it sticks as though it 
were a rag saturated with glue. 



Bluish flames flicker for a moment over the cracks, 
lighting up the cliffs. Even the fire fountains are in 
no hurry. After the thunderous boom which gives 
them birth the molten lava like the product of a 
smelting furnace at its highest heat swings upward, 
changing color as it goes, with the same appearance of 
oppressive weight. 

The flickering light playing on the jagged cliffs 
suggests infinite possibilities in the realm of mystery. 

The heat arising precipitates whatever moisture 
there may be in the air into a cloud, and so, hanging 
perpetually over the fiery vat, is a red and angry sheet 
of mist, which reflects back the uncanny light. 

I tried to conjure up an adequate simile, and 
could think of nothing but a fight of overfed titanic 
reptiles of a past age, swimming in a sea of red paint, 
with lightning playing continuously over the scene. 





A (ocfliMuy Palm ^f^ove. 



CHAPTER X. 



Good-bye to Pele.— Railroading down the Mountain.— A Human 
Sandwicii.— Self-denial of the iVlissionaries. 




HEN the morning came for 
our departure from Kil- 
auea old Mauna Loa's 
slope showed still pink 
in the slanting sunlight. 
Below the cliffs the black- 
ened pit smouldered sulr 
lenly and the lava fields 
looked like the flame- 
eaten ruins of a thousand homes. 
Madame Pele, the presiding god- 
ess of the volcano, has more 
moods than a spoiled child, and 
staying for months, we might have had a fresh menu 
every day; so it was with genuine regret that we began 
to pack, Burridge his acre or so of sketches, I my bag 
of shoes and half-barrel of lava specimens. 

These, by the way, narrowly escaped being left be- 



hind for there was a cat, a moonlighter, with a rich 



36 



contralto voice who under the lea of our bungalow 
poured out a passionate aria every evening, or so much 
of it as was possible before Burridge filed a hard, rocky, 
pound and half objection on the car's anatomy. My 
lava half bricks were altogether too good to last. But 
this is getting away from the subject. 

Our return to Honolulu was over a different route 
from the one taken in going, involving a thirty-mile ride 
by stage and railroad down the leeward or dry side of 
the island to the port of Punaluu : thence northward 
along the coast for a day and a half of steamer travel. 
This way of returning completed an entire circuit of all 
the islands south of Ohau. 

The returning party numbered altogether four 
ladies and seven gentlemen. And it took a couple of 
carriages to accommodate it, with a saddle horse or two 
for the overflow. 

The air was still and crisp and invigorating when 
we clambered aboard and waved adieu to the chief en- 
gineer of the volcano, Mr. Lee, and his family. 

The ride was one of those pleasant things to re- 
member but of no particular interest when described. 
The wagon trail led for most of the way over a flow of 
lava and was in it way full of more ups and downs 
than a political career in a doubtful State. The road 
wound in and out canons, affording entrancing gUmses 
of rugged scenery with here and there a sight of the 
blue Pacific glistening in the sun. _ 

The way for the most' part was lined with sub- 
tropical foliage somewhat sparse on account of the 
perpetual dryness. 



^aHum^ 



miMh 



maSim^ 



RAILROADING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. 



37 



There was a sort of enforce variety to the scenery, 
too. Just as a man settled himself to gaze on some 
delightful vista of hill and dale there would be a warn- 
ing yell from the Hank Monk of a driver, and he would 
find his head pounding a merry tatoo on the roof of 
the stage. 

When he struck the bottom again all the scenery 
he could see would be a gaudy astronomical display. 




He Never Swore. 

The government road now being constructed on 
the other side of the island will change all this in 
time. 

About II o'clock the caravan stopped at a half- 
way house, which, in spite of a rather unpromising ex- 
terior, afforded a very fine roast chicken dinner, 

It was kept by a hermit, so-called, a graduate of 
Oxford, who cooked the meals and served them himself. 
He satisfied himself with the society of a one-legged 
hen, and was apparently happy in it. The hen occupied 
the foot of his bed nearly all the time in a nest of pil- 
lows. 

The mouth of a volanie cave, the remains of a sub- 
terranean lava river, is here, and its end has never been 
reached by man. Some of our party took a trip of an 
hour and a half's duration, reaching a spot where the 
roof was hung with delicate lava stalactites not larger 
than lead pencils in thickness, but several feet long. 

A continuation of the drive for an hour or two 
over fine mountainside pasture lands brought us to a 
sugar plantation well down toward the coast. 



Here we took the plantation railroad for Punaluu. 
Nearly every large one maintains its own narrow-guage 
road. These roads are frequently marvels of erratic en- 
gineering. The right of way dodges and shies like a 
cow being chased out of a garden. The speed, of 
course, is not great. If it was it would be like the 
game of " crack the whip." 

The man who originally surveyed the road must 
have been following the trail of a wild goat which was 
laboring under great excitement. 

It was at this plantation that I was made the 
victim of other folks' gallantry, or a low-down trick, I 
don't know which. The train consisted of a dozen 
coaches, the rear one only being covered and having 
seats. The rest of them were about the size of hand 
cars without the pumping works. 

We gave up the first class coach to the ladies and 
three of us tried to make ourselves comfortable on a flat 
car. Just as the train was about to start two belated 
Kanaka ladies came puffing up. 

There was no room left, and Jim Williams, the 
Honolulu photographer who was sitting beside me, 
arose with his usual courtesy and gave up his seat. 
Burridge, not to be outdone in gallantry, did Hkewise . 
with the other. 

The supply of Kanaka females gave out at this 
juncture, and there was no one left to whom I could 




A Kanaka Postoffice. 

relinquish my seat. So I sat there like a small piece 
of lean meat in a mighty thick human sandwich. 

The two ladies were even beyond the regulation 
weight of 250 pounds and the thermometer registered 
something in the nineties, for we were pretty far down 
toward the sea level. 

Every time the train went over a gorge my seat- 
mates nestled up closer and seemed to regard me as 
the only sure preventative of a serious railroad disaster. 



38 



A HUMAN SANDWICH. 



When we neared a precipice one of them persisted in 
grabbing me in a blood-boiling clutch. 

I asked her kindly not to do it. I explained to 
her that I was no parachute and was of no earthly 
utility in a mad leap through space, but my protests 
were of little or no avail. 

I did not enjoy the ride though Messrs. Williams 
and Burridge seemed tickled to death about something 
throughout the whole nine-mile run. And our ladies 
in the rear coach too seemed to see a good deal in the 
barren landscape that was uproriously funny. 

I wanted ice and I wanted air pretty badly all the 
way, but there was one consoling thought : Mrs. Jones 
was not present to accuse me of flirting. 




Tropical Transit. 

Punaluu, reached in the middle of the afternoon, 
is a native settlement of some size and has a hotel 
which is surprisingly well kept. 

In fact this feature of Hawaiian travel is some- 
thing that excites constant wonder. A plunge bath, 
a walk on the beach, a good dinner and some Kanaka 
music in the evening occupied the time very pleasantly 
until the hour of retiring. 

That night the steamer Hall came down the coast 
and anchored in the roadstead. At 3 a. m. her 
whistle was blown as a signal for the embarkation 
of passengers. 

It was necessary to get on board before dawn, as 
the morning breeze kicks up a sea that makes the 



operation not only unpleasant but dangerous. Our 
party piled out like people at a fire, and after a cup 
of coffee and a light lunch, made for the pier. 

The Kanaka crew had been handling freight all 
night, and we went off to the steamer in the last freight 
boat. Then the trip northward commenced, just as 
the sky was getting pink in the east. 

Landward, thirty miles up the mountain, the 
angry glow of Kilauea was visible against the clouds. 
Most of the passengers turned in to finish their night's 
rest, but the rocky wall, fringed with green on one side 
and the glories of a tropical sunrise on the other, af- 
forded plenty of inducement to stay on deck. 

Our course lay all day along the rugged coast of 
Hawaii, with stops at frequent intervals. Early in the 
afternoon the Hall rounded a rocky headland and put 
into Cook's Bay. 

It was here that the great circumnavigator and 
discoverer of the islands met his death. His com- 
patriots have marked the spot with a monument of 
light stone, and the place is one which tourists make 
an effort to visit. 

A rude rock and log pier, two or three houses, a 
chicken yard and the monument are the " chief objects 
of interest," as the guide books are wont to say. 

There is a postofifice here, as there is at nearly all 
the landings. Burridge had developed a mania for 
mailing letters to his friends and enemies from all 
sorts of inaccessible places. His correspondents had 
about run out when we reached Cook's monument; 
but he managed to scratch off an impassioned aooeal 
to his Chicago washwoman, praying her to return tnat 
missing half-hose so that he could have it when he got 
home. 

This had to go with the monument postmark on 
it. We went ashore in the whaleboat and hunted up 
the postmaster, a mild-mannered old gentleman who 
aimed to please and merit a continuance of our 
patronage. 

We found the P. M. on the pier, with the rest of 
the population, his handfuU of letters made up and 
ready to be taken by our steamer. 

Burridge insisted that his washlady would fret 
unless she heard from him direct from Cook's Monu- 
ment and prevailed upon the aged man to go back to 
his house, get the postage stamp and take a hasty 
shot at it with the inkpad. 

All this took time and when they returned the 
mate in the whaleboat yelled "All aboard," in a pointed 
and meaning manner. They scrambled over the rocks, 
the old P. M. endeavoring to make change as he leaped. 

He missed his footing and went " bows on," as 
the mate expressed it, into a crevice between two large 
rocks while a wave came in and nearly drowned him. 
He was mute, but he turned to us a countenance 
working with the most frightful contortions as we 
lifted him out. 

"What's the matter — lockjaw ?" asked Burridge. 

The victim shook his head. 

We picked up the coin and letters, but still no 
word of execration. The old gentleman hobbled over 



SELF-DENIAL OF THE MISSIONARIES. 



39 



the jagged lava and delivered his mail, working his 
lips but without emitting a sound. 

"I wonder why he didn't cuss?" mused Burridge 
as we were pulled out to the steamer. Then on ar- 
rival he put the question to the captain. 

" Was it the old postmaster? " he asked, 

" Yes." 

" He is a missionary. If he had cussed he would 
have lost his job. I tell you, the missionaries have a 
very bad time of it. I wouldn't be a missionary on 
just that account." 



Later in the afternoon we struck even a more 
primitive postoffice. 

It consisted of a rubber stamp, a box of shoe 
blacking, and a palm tree. 

This postmaster sat on the ground with a piece of 
plank between his feet on which were the letters, and 
merrily plugged the portraits on "the stamps with a 
grunt at every disfigurement. 

He didn't look worried over politics and a change 
of administration had no terrors for him. 





Loading (attle 



CHAPTER XI 



The Hawaiian Steer— Gingery and Frolicsome— An Aquatic Bull 
Fight— Loading the Tree Roosting Cattle. 




HOSE westerri parts of the 
islands called the leeward, or 
dry sides, along which our 
return voyage was made, 
supply magnificent but un- 
worked stone quarry sites 
with incidental cattle 
ranches. These ranches, 
which have a slant like a to- 
bogan slide, are composed of 
thousands of acres of brick-red soil from which spring 
rich, juicy jagged lava rocks, affording the cattle the 
greatest facilities on earth for scratching their backs 



and sides. The Hawaian cattle, it is needless to say, 
are automatic curry combers. 

Eating seems to be a secondary consideration. 
There is grass and herbage to be found higher up on 
the mountains but it is not visible except in spots 
from the coast. 

Water is the serious ranch problem. I have seen 
cattle come down to the sea at low tide and standj 
knee deep in the surf and drink. 

Before any one rises up and remarks that Jones is 
backsliding again in the trifling matter of veracity I 
wish to interpose an explanation and state that 
whether by instinct or simply by pure hustle, the cat- 
tle had found that there were springs of fresh water 
bubbling up under the salt and that is what they were 
after, 

I waded out with a tin cup to 'try this drink, but 
not knowing as much about water as a year -old heifer 
with no school advantages I missed the spring and in- 
advertently quaffed a cupful of Hunyadi water, of 
which the Pacific ocean is composed. 

They say that if shipwrecked sailors drink sea 
water they go crazy. I believe this and I know that 
nothing but the fact that I had not recently been 
shipwrecked saved my already tottering intellect. 

The cattle we saw were wild-eyed and lean, and 



40 



BiHi 



THE HAWAIIAN STEER. 



4^ 



had been trained down to make a mile in less 
than 2:10. 

They look like overgrown greyhounds with horns. 
They shy and kick like a soubrette actress, and their 
kicks have all the sparkle and verve of those of a 
Missouri mule laboring under acute mental anguish. 

At a comparatively recent date the algeroba tree 
was transplanted here, and on the dry side of the 
islands it thrives wonderfully. It will grow on soil 
which has heretofore only supported cacti. 




The Cows Convulsed with Mirth. 

Cattle and horses feed on the pods of this tree 
and fatten on the diet. 

It is stated that these pods are identically the 
same kind on which the Prodigal Son lunched — before 
he went back to the old man for veal pot-pie and a 
new deal. 

I tried to eat one. They have a mild, bitter- 
sweet taste, and are like petrified string beans cooked 
in cough syrup. 

Since trying them I have even less respect for 
the Prodigal Son than ever before. If I had made a 
failure in the prodigal line of effort, it seems to me that 
about one meal of these "husks" would have driven 
me to the expediency of a sight draft on the old gen- 
tleman at once. 

The algeroba tree matures enough to do business 
and shed its patent medicine fruit in about five years. 
It has a fine, feathery foliage and considerable barbed 
wire fencing concealed about its person which seems to 
resent familiarity. 

One of the largest if not the largest ranch owners 
in the kingdom, is Sam Parker, a half caste, and the 



last Minister of Interior under the Queen. He has 
sixty or eighty thousand head; he hasn't taken a cen- 
sus lately and no one knows exactly how many. 

He told me that he had at one time an idea 
that he would like to market some of his cattle in 
Chicago, so he looked up Mr. Armour and commenced 
to talk business. He had a pretty large ranch, he 
said, and he would like to make a shipment. This 
was agreeable, and Sam asked how many head he 
should ship. 

"I will take 40,000 a week," remarked the Chi- 
cago packer. " I wouldn't care to handle any more 
than that." 

This ossified the big Hawaiian. When he re- 
covered he told him that Chicago was too big for 
him. "Why," he added in telling the circumstance, 
"that man Armour would depopulate my ranch in 
ten days." 

The leanness and activity of Parker's cattle has 
come to be a matter of public proverb and possible 
tradition. 

He heard a short time ago that an acquaintance 
had bought some land and was about to start a ranch. 
The two men met in the streets of Honolulu. The 
Honorable Sam opened up with a proposition. 

"Say, Colonel," he proposed, " I've got more cattle 
than I need. Let me stock up your ranch for you." 

"W-w-w-with your k-k-k-critters?" asked the Col- 
onel. 




P. D. Armour Paralyzes the Hon. Sam Parker. 

"Yes. I've got just what you want." 

" G-g-guess not. It w-w-would k-k-cost too 
much." 

" Oh, I can let you have 'em mighty cheap. I'm 
overstocked." 

"N-no, g-g-guess not. Y-you see, I-I-I-haven't 
got any t-t-t-timber on my r-r-r-ranch an' it w-would 
k-k-k-cost too much t-t-t-to build r-roosts for 'em." f 

The island cattle are marketed in Honolulu, bring- 
ing from $30 to $45 per head, according to weight and 
condition. The chief item of expense is the trans- 



AN AQUATIC BULL-FIGHT. 



portation thither, which amounts to from $5 to $8 
steamboat fare each. 

One of the most exciting and characteristic sights 
of island life is afforded by the loading of the wild and 
kittenish steers on the steamers. 

It takes on all the aspect of sport, and nerve- 
tingling sport at that. There is all the excitement of 
the usual round-up, with a strong spice of Spanish 
bull fight, a dash of aquatic athletics, with an occa- 




A Night Scene in Parker's Ranch, 

sional divertisement in the way of a free-for-all race, 
when a critter punches its way through the living 
corral and breaks for the hills. 

When a bunch of steers is brought to a landing 
for shipment it is penned in a stone corral open on the 
sea, if there is one, and if not, which is usually the case, 
it is surrounded by a line of natives on foot and horse- 
back. 

The Kanaka is a natural horseman, as he is a 
sailor, and rides with more of the abandon and grace 
of an Apache or a Comanche than of the usual white 
cowboy of the plains. 

Just outside the curling breakers rides the steamer's 
whale boats ready to take the animals in tow. Then 
the word is passed and the circus commences. 

With a whoop, which is used on all festive occa- 
sions in season and out of season, a stalwart Kanaka, 
pinching his little horse between his knees like a vise, 
rides into the herd and cuts out a steer. 

He swings a lariat with a swish, and before the 
rope has settled over the animal's horns the little 



broncho plunges into the breakers with the joy of a 
truant boy in swimming. 

The steer bucks and prances and plunges, but 
with every leap the rope sags and the pony walks 
away with the slack. 

The wildest struggles are adoitly snubbed on the 
pommel, and from the start it is a losing fight for the 
steer. 

The bottom is rocky, rough and jagged. The 
pony is in deeper water and working against the waves, 
therefore at a great disadvantage. 

A second cowboy spurs his horse into the fray. 
He leans over and grabs the steer's tail, which is 
pounding the air and water like a whip lash. 

He loops the end of the tail and puts the bight 
around his pommel. This lifts the steer's hind feet 
off the rocks and he is slewed around broadside to 
the sea. 

In jumps a nude native who splashes salt water 
into the face of the animal with all the vigor and effect 
of a burst in a fire pipe hose. At this point the fight 
is exciting in the extreme. 

We watched twenty-five of these combats from a 
safe station from the rocks above, in the course of an 
hour or so. 

From our post of observation the rocks formed an 
amphitheater with a seething foaming, bottom. In it 
the men, horses and steer were frequently an indis- 
tinguishable struggling mass of life. Big seas some- 
times engulfed all the combatants, carrying them 
shoreward. 

The period of time which a Kanaka will stay 
under water is amazing, not to say alarming. I saw 
a feat of submarine horsemanship which is not easy 
to believe. 

A wave caught one of the riders broadside, and 
with the pulling of the steer on the pommel he was 
carried with his horse under water. 

The next instant the horse's hoofs were visible, 
kicking above the surf. The next the rider rose to 
the surface on the opposite side from the one on which 
he went down, still in the saddle. 

He had been rolled completely over, and blowing 
the salt water from his mouth and nose he let go of the 
lariat, which ran under his animal, caught it on the 
shoreward side, took a turn like lightning around the 
pommel, and plunged into the next sea apparently 
unconscious of the splendid feat he had just performed. 

The water dashed in the eyes of the poor steer 
confuses him so that he can't tell the Pacific Ocean 
from Manna Kea. 

He then becomes a comparatively easy victim. 
The cowboy with the tow line swims out to the waiting 
boat, and when the crew gets hold of it Mr. Steer 
comes away as though there were a turn around a 
steam winch. 

He devotes his energies to just plain swimming, 
without fancy strokes. Arriving at the boat he usually 
attempts to crawl on board, but this tendency is 
discouraged. 

He is floated around and stood on end in the 



LOADING THE TREE-ROOSTING CATTLE. 



43 



water with his back against the whale boat's sides. 

If he has horns they are hooked over the rail and 
his head is lashed to the seat. His fore feet stick out 
above the water in a bless-you-my-children posture. 
When all the available space on the rail is festooned 
with steers heads the animals are towed off to the 
steamer. 

They are then unlashed, floated under a block and 
tackle arrangement, where a sort of saddle is placed 




The Captain Controls a Steer. 

under them. This is hooked on to the tackle, the 
boatswain pipe is heard, and the animals are jerked 
upward, fighting like demons, and then lowered away 
to a point about a foot above the deck. 

The lashing on the horns is then made fast to a 
spar running lengthwise and fixed at the proper height, 
their heads being hauled down as close to the spar as 
possible. They are then ready for the voyage. The 
whole operation is scientific in its way, and the speed 
with which a cargo of wild cattle is made up, consider- 



ing the superior strength and fighting qualities of the 
animals, is simply marvelous. 

It struck me as very brutal, but nobody has been 
able to suggest an improvement. 

When one of the steers breaks out of the corral he 
is usually, but not always, allowed to go, for after a hot 
run, followed by a fight in the sea, the shock and chill 
of the latter frequently kills him. Out of the twenty- 
five cattle which were fellow passengers with us two 
died. 

When the animals die they are gotten overboard 
as quickly as possible, for a death affects the survivors 
as though they were human. A panic seizes the bunch 
and they commence struggling at their lashings in a 
way calculated to move the beholder with pity and 
horror. 

But once in a while the cowboys and sailors do not 
have it all their own way. We made the trip to Hilo 
with Captain Davis, of the Caudine 

He had a big steer part its lashings after it had 
been put on board. The way it cleared the open lower 
deck was most beautiful to see. 

The Kanaka sailors have a bright happy way of 
walking on the backs ot the rows of standing cattle 
when at work. They do this to avoid the kicks they 
would receive if they went anywhere in the neighbor- 
hood of the loose end of the animals. 

But this Napoleon of steerdom would not even 
allow that time honored familiarity. He tore up and 
down the deck with an undisputed right of way. 

When a Kanaka sailor attempted to slip a noose 
over his wooly head he ducked and charged with a 
gallantry which brought cheers from the upper deck. 
The deck hands found it advisable to jump over and 
cling to the outside of the rail while the steer bumped 
his head against the bulwarks. 

They ducked their heads when the shock came 
and bobbed up when it was over. The Captain 
watched this from the bridge with an impatient frown. 

" I'll show you how to handle that steer," he re- 
marked as he dropped down and advanced toward the 
bovine officer of that deck. 

The steer stopped and returned the Captain's in- 
solent stare in kind. Then, without any preliminary 
agreement, the pair commenced an exciting game of 
tag. The steer, was " it." 

I think it was a matter of about ten seconds when 
the Captain was shinning up a spar and beseeching 
some one to call off the brute. 

He was eventually lassoed and secured, but I 
stand ready to back Captain Davis to any reasonable 
amount in a Fourth of July greased pole climbing 
contest. 




CHAPTER XII. 



The Difference between Stealing Wholesale and Stealing Retail 
Illustrated— The Hawaiian Navy and American ditto— Bur- 
ridge and his Dress Suit— Naval Balls. 



^^^-^^^^^-^"^ 





PON entering the port of 
Honolulu a second time 
we caught sight of the 
steamer which once con- 
stituted the Hawaiian 
navy. This ex-navy was 
painted a dirty lead color, 
was stripped of its war- 
hke trappings and had 
been relegated to private 
life. It is now working 
the white-winged peace 
angle, as your sporting 
friend would say, and is 
fetching up from the islands cargoes of sugar, rice, 
paddy, bananas, coffee, cattle, poi and Kanakas. 

The job is not nearly so gay as that of the old 
times, but it is less fretting to the owners. 



HONOLULU HARBOR FROM 

PUNCH BOWL HILL. 

« 

The one-time navy looks like a Lake Michigan 
lumber barge after a bad season. No one would ever 
accuse it of having, in its mild youth, been long, low 
and rakish, and ready to belch iron hail should a foreign 
power intimate that the natives of Hawaii originally 
came from Africa. 

This by the way is the deadliest output of the 
Kanaka insult foundry. 

The old Kanaka kings had their navies, but they 
were composed of fleets of war canoes with out-riggers 
or rigged catamaran style and sometimes lateen sails. 

The ambition fell to the late Kalakaua to have a 
real sure enough navy, with guns, and cannons and 
repairs and appropriations and all that, in the good 
American style. 

Foreign war ships came into his harbor to main- 
tain the dignity of their respective countries, and inci- 
dentally have a good time. They gave balls as well 
as ultimatums, and the Kanaka royalty, nobility, and 
gentry went off to the ships and danced and drank the 
punch, which is always full of action and enterprise in 
naval circles. 

The late king thought it good, and desired to 
travel in the same class. Besides that he had a scheme 
to make the navy pay dividends. 

The scheme itself was all right, but he forgot 
something. In fact, his early education had been not 
exactly neglected, but diverted from its proper chan- 



44 



THE HA WAHAN NA VY AND AMERICAN DITTO. 



45 



nels. Had he but manicured his dark brown intellect 
in youth with a certain reading-book which gave me 
pain twice per day in the fall and winter of 1866, he 
would have known better. 

In this book is a story which starts like a play, 
but has a sermon in its inside pocket. The scene is 
located somewhere in the suburbs of Greece. Alex- 
ander the Great, surrounded by men whose costume 
consists of a lawn-tennis shirt and a spear, all oc- 
cupying the o. p. side. A clanking of chains is heard 
without. Enter r. u. e. what is left of a Clark street 
raid in the clutch of a big policeman anxious to do all 
the talking to the court. 

Says Alexander with the rising inflection : "What, 
art thou that Thracian robber of whose exploits I have 
heard so much ?" 

He talked very good and grammatical EngHsh, 
considering he was nothing but a Levant dago. 




Art Thou that Thracian Robber? 

The robber speaks up : "I am a Thracian and a 
soldier." 

The court sneers at this and the poUceman starts 
in to tell how it was, but is shut off. 

The robber doesn't try to beg off because he was 
full and had a hungry family, but starts right in with 
a campaign speech, comparing his record with that of 
Alexander. 

He explains that while he has merely worked the 
sandbag in a humble but proficient way the great 
weeper has held up trains and tied express messengers 
to the floor. While he has gone with the gang and 
looted villages too small to have postoffices the great 
Alexander, who I also think was the original smart 
Alexander, feloniously appropriated to his own use, as 
the warrant reads, certain nations and countries. 



He then made remarks about the difference be- 
tween footpaddery for glory and for a living, concluding 
with some pertinent remarks as to the general nature 
and social standing of the hog. 

This didn't strike Alec as good sense and they 
argued the matter over. 

I don't remember what became of the gentleman 
from Thrace but I think the big General either held 
him over for trial or let him off on a suspended sen- 
tence after showing him his error. 

The lesson somehow stuck in my young mind 
that the exact degree of criminality of crime in the 
public view depends not so much on the motive as 
on the size of the operation. I couldn't myself under- 
stand the difference, morally, between a Napoleon of 
finance and a common vulgar circus flim-flammer; but 
it seems there is a difference and courts and juries 
frequently discover it. 

Now that is what ailed King Calico. He thought 
the Thracian was as good as Alexander, and the flim- 
flammer merited as much admiration as the N. of F. 

He had seen England and France and Germany 
send out war ships, pick a quarrel with some South 
Pacific island king and proceed to seize his domain 
and rule it by right of conquest, which is the other 
name for wholesale sandbagging. 

Down across the equator a couple of thousand of 
miles from the Hawaiian Islands lies Samoa. The 
Samoan ruler was a poor, no-account King with a 
salary of $20 a year and most of that was worked out 
by his subjects or came in the shape of store orders. 

His navy was not much more formidable than a 
fleet of row boats. * 

So Kalakaua conceived the idea that Samoa would 
do well under Hawaiian rule, and forgot the great fact 
that what England might do with perfect propriety, 
being big enough, would in his case be considered a 
raw and bloody Bulgarian outrage. 

It was given out that the royal navy of Hawaii 
was to be sent to Samoa to secure reciprocity. But I 
am informed that the reciprocity sought was of the 
kind which obtains in lion and lamb circles. 

The little ship was fitted out with new paint and 
four lO-pounders. The king did not go himself, but he 
sent a number of officers, admirals, rear admirals, com- 
modores, commanders, captains, some of whom had 
never been to sea before, to represent him. 

Pinafore is called a comic opera, but beside this 
venture it would be as solemn as a mystery play of the 
middle ages. 

The Royal Hawaiian Band of forty pieces, a really 
fine organization, also went along. There were carried 
more gin and whisky than coal, more gold lace than 
provisions. 

The voyage to Apia is a long one, and before they 
got there the coal gave out. But they readily over- 
came this little difficulty by breaking up and burning 
the cases in which the gin came, and thus demonstated 
the wisdom of bringing along so much juniper juice. 

English, German, and American interests in Samoa 
made conquest hardly feasible, and the navy found that 



46 



BURRIDGE AND HIS DRESS SUIT. 



reciprocity wouldn't reciprocate. The mission was given 
up, but the band played some mighty fine music on 
the beach, and the officers paralyzed the barbaric Sam- 
oan court with its gold lace and female hats. 

But the naval force had to eat. The poi got low 
in the barrel and the dried fish ran out. 

One of the admirals had to chase around and see 
a grocery man. The Hawaiians wanted poi and salt 
horse on credit, but the dealer didn't take any stock in 
their promise to pay the bill on Saturday night. So 
they had to give security, and turned over the four 
lO-pounders, as being the things that could be spared 
most readily. 




The Secrets of the Boudoir Exposed. 

The idea of a blood-thirsty navy bent on war right 
away, without the means of even firing a salute, didn't 
seem to worry them. 

So they got their poi and a little coal and some 
gin and turned the nose of the war ship homeward. 

This trip so inured most of the officers to the 
kittenish ways of the fickle deep that they could go 
out in rather rough weather and not be sea-sick. 

The Hawaiian navy is no more and its army is 
tired, so the government looks with complaisance at 
least on the presence of a representative of our navy, 
which is usually lying in Honolulu harbor. 

Life on board the American ships, which looks as 
busy as a policeman's job, gets fearfully monotonous. 
But the bluff of being ready to fight before the other 
fellow can get off his coat shall and must be maintained. 

So the officers have to act as though if they re- 
laxed a little they would get hit by a half brick by the 
enemy. Life with the men is one hilarious round of 
scrubbing and painting, and scrubbing and scraping off 
the paint and scrubbing, and then painting again, 
month in and month out. 

The boy who is contemplating running away and 
joining the navy had better make a note of this. 

Every once in a while the officers give a ball. 
This, I suspect, keeps them from going crazy from the 



fearful dose oi monotony and repeat. Burridge and 1 
attended one of these balls. 

It was a bright and joyous occasion, and Burridge 
will remember it a long, long time. On the evening of 
the festivities the Pacific was as calm and unruffled as 
an uncut custard pie. Off in the harbor lay the ship 
at anchor with the light against her rigging, giving it a 
phantom, cob-webby appearance against the blue sky 
of the tropical night. 

The decks were draped in bunting above the rail, 
through which the light shone, colored and softened by 
the fabric, with an indescribably beautiful effect. 

A steam tender and several of the ship's boats 
manned by sailors carried the guests off to the ship, 
and as we approached, music came floating over the 
water with all the added charm that distance and 
moonlight lends. The scene aboard was just as en- 
chanting, with the grim engines of war masked by 
flags and smothered in flowers and festooned greenery. 
Populate the scene with four hundred people in evening 




Take Off my Vest. 

dress, the ladies with superb toilets, and one can 
imagine what our navy looks like when it dances 
with its friends. 

A few days before when Burridge got his invitation, 
a realizing sense of the fact came over him that he was 
5,000 fniles away from his dress suit, and he was as sore 
as a stone bruise. Lieutenant Morrell, to whom he 
confided his canker, told him to come any way, — 
his overalls and no one would make any 



come m 

remarks. 

But 



he gave it up until some one 



suggested 



MORAL BALLS. 



47 



borrowing. He make known his great grief, and ac- 
commodating but lean friends came nobly to the 
rescue. 

He borrowed a pair of trousers from Colonel Cobb. 
Mr. J. T. Ball, of Chicago, loaned him an evening coat 
which had been left in his custody by a friend who had 
gone down the islands. 

He got a vest of a third gentleman who was fat. 
When it was put on it hung out like a parachute or a 
ballet dancer's skirt. 

I may be doing wrong in divulging the secrets 
of the boudoir, but the truth has to go. I took in 
about a half bushel of slack in the vest and tied it up 
with twine. 

Burridge kicked all the time and said he would'tgo. 
I really believed he couldn't have been kept at home 
by a broken leg. But I argued with him with a mouth 
full of pins, and I think I persuaded him that he 
looked like a bird — the breed not specified. 

After we got aboard and became interested in the 
mazy dance and more mazy punch, Burridge com- 
menced to forget himself 

It seems that he had made some solemn pledges 
to the owners of his clothes concerning the same. In 
relaxing his vigilance he commenced to smash the 
pledges like an independent candidate after election. 

Carking care was seen on the collective brows of 
the syndicate of clothing owners. 

Then they commenced to follow Burridge around 



in a body. He sat down to converse with a pretty 
girl. Colonel Cobb rushed up and called him aside. 

" See here Burridge," he said, "you promised me 
not to sit down in those trousers. I don't want them 
if you* are going to get them baggy in the knees. 
Ple3.se remember your promise to me." 

After a lively dance Burridge commenced to breath 
hard. This alarmed Mr. Ball, who sought him out. 

" Mr. Burridge, that coat is a pretty tight fit, and 
if you persist in throwing your shoulders forward you 
will have it split up the back. It doesn't belong to me, 
and I want you to be more careful. You have let a 
lady deposit some face powder on the collar, too. I 
didn't think this of you." 

The gentleman who loaned him the pumps re- 
minded him pointedly just as he was asking a lady to 
dance that he had pledged himself not to trip the 1. f. 
toe as long as he stood in the speaker's shoes. 

The man who owned the vest was wild when he 
saw the result of my carpenter work on it. 

"Take off that vest," he peremtorily demanded, 
" or let it out, I don't care which. I won't have it 
dragged out or shape." 

No one could stand this, and Burridge feigned 
illness or insanity or something, and went below to the 
gun deck, where he sat and smoked cigarettes in the 
shadow of a big gun, using half breaths all the 
time. This is why I think he will remember the festiv- 
ities a long time. 







On Tne HflvvAii/iN (()A^T^ 



CHAPTER XIII 



The Sweets of Loafing — The Land of To-morrow — Suspicious of 
Hustlers — A JWan in a Mother Hubbard — The Mahopi Habit. 




king, 
tails 



He is 

suffering 



HAVE always had a sort of sneak- 
ing regard for the conscientiously 
lazy man; he who has the strength 
of character to defy public opinion 
and to industriously devote him- 
self to the sweets of indolence 
with the calm placidity of the 
truly great. Such a man is a 
more — he is a czar, and serenely en- 
on others with the matter-of-course 



48 



feeling which only belongs to absolute monarchs and 
pretty women. 

Thoreau, whose chief glory was that he could 
wear a patch or even a sunbonnet without a blush, 
found by actual experiment that seventeen days of 
labor would keep a man a year even in grudging New 
England, and that the hustle of the remaining 348 
days went only to buy food which did not agree with 
us, clothes which were for show not protection, and 
gilded shelter. 

The Apostle of Simplicity worked hard and then 
he loafed hard. It always seemed to me that he was 
not only sane but sensible. 

There are a good many men in America to whom 
the greatest compliment of life is to be called "hustlers." 
They tear around like village people at a fire for twelve 
or fourteen hours a day, six days in the week, and fret 
all day Sunday about business — for what ? Simply, 
they will tell you, to make a pile before they die, so 
that they can retire from business and enjoy life. 

Of course there are numbers with the magpie in- 
stinct who want to heap up a pile for the fun of the 
thing, so they can sit on the chilly apex of the same 
with a shot gun and be envied by the equally mis- 
guided but less fortunate. But these are not the 
iTiasses, and the mass is what I am talking about. 

Most of them are struggling in the hope that 
some day they can live on their incomes and become 



"^HE LAND OF TO-MORROW. 



49 



respectable loafers and raise fancy pups and go fishing 
six days in the week and even on Sunday, if they are 
quiet about it. 

But this dream is of the future, and it seems better 
— more certain — to collect the bill for labor on the in- 
stalment plan and raise our pups and go fishing as we 
travel along. 

And that is what threw me into a trance of admi- 
ration over the islands. It is fashionable to be lazy. 




"Sit on the Chilly Apex." 

There are hustlers there who build railroads and resort 
hotels and lay out town sites and sell lots and conduct 
themselves generally in the misguided Chicago fashion. 
But they are looked upon with suspicion. 

The common way is to take life as easily as the 
head Indian fighter does in the border drama with his 
trusty rifle. 

It's the climate, of course, that makes it so. When 
a tourist first comes he works ten hours per day at the 
sight-seeing trade. Then he joins himself in an eight- 
hour movement, which is invariably successful. This is 
rapidly decreased until he sits on the Hawaiian Hotel 
piazza and dreams and smokes for sixteen hours out of 
a possible sixteen, and tries to stifle a guilty conscience, 
sore over the fact that he isn't getting his money's 
worth of sights. 

Then the climate gets in its perfect work. Even 
his conscience refuses to rise up and accuse him, and 
it soldiers the happy hours away with the abandon of 
utter debasement. 

If a man wants quiet and rest and has any natural 
reluctance to go to jail, Honolulu is the next best 
place on earth to get it. 



The islands are called, and rightfully called, the 
land of the Mahopi. Mahopi means to-morrow, next 
week, by and by, or never, according to the context and 
the intent of the speaker. Its most exact translation, 
however, is "by and by." If you ask a native to do 
anything for you and he says, " All right, I will, ma- 
hopi," it means that you had better hustle for it 
yourself. 

It is a very handy word and it is worked pretty 
hard in the local vernacular. The natives live up to 
the mahopi idea with religious consistency. 

The most energetic citizens of the United States 
are the newsboys, and the gulf between them and the 
Honolulu article is something unspannable even in 
fancy. The little Kanaka' boy who sells the Pacific 
Morning Advertiser and the Evening Bulletin, came to 
the hotel and stood in a shadowy corner of the cor- 
ridor with one bare foot on the other and just looked 
sorry about something. His eyes were big and black 
and he gazed with much pathos at the people who 
could read, but he didn't do anything else to sell his 
papers. Indeed he seemed to part from them with a 
pang. One day The Bulletin referred to me as "ge- 
nial and accomplished." I wanted a number of copies 
to decorate with a frame of blue pencil marks and send 
to a lot of people — acquaintances of mine — who don't 
know how good or great a man is until they see it in 
the papers. 




Business Hours in Chicago. 

He only had three or four copies and I tried to 
buy them, but it was like a special sacrifice sale — only 
one article would be sold to each person. 

He explained that ifhe sold out, his business would 
be gone. I told him that he might go back to the city 
circulator and get all the papers remaining from that 
day's run and I would buy them. 

He said," Mahopi," and I havn't seen him since, 
while hundreds of Illinois people will go down to their 



50 



SUSPICIOUS OF HUSTLERS. 



graves and never know how genial and accomplished I 
am when away from home. 

Instances of the mahopi habit spring up at every 
hand. We stepped into the hut of a native in the out- 
skirts of the town for a glass of water. 

We found the gentleman of the house at home. 
He had evidently said "mahopi" to some one a few 
days previously and was waiting for the affair to blow 
over. He was seated in a rocking-chair attired in his 
wife's Mother Hubbard. 

He was an exceedingly dignified, white-haired old 
gentleman and received us with courtly courtesy and a 
warm handshake. 




^ *^<^^'^ 



Business Hours in Mahopi-Land. 

Thoreau himself couldn't have worn the Mother 
Hubbard with more queenly grace. 

He explained casually that his only pair of jean 
trousers were being mended or laundried or something. 

At any rate, his good wife had them temporarily, 
while instead of going to bed or bumping around in a 
coarse, ill-fitting, headless barrel suspended by galluses, 
as is the custom in the States under similar stress of 
circumstances, he donned his wifes extra gown and 
wore it like a perfect lady. 

Had there been no such thing as mahopi in this 
country he would probably have owned as many suits 
of clothes as a professional beauty. 

Mahopiism reaches clear into the realm of nature. 
Take for instance that superb type of industrial acti- 
vity, the mosquito. 

The natives of the jungles of New Jersey or the 
swamps of Indiana are tireless. They work night and 
day, regardless of the behests of the trade unions, as 



long as the supply of raw material holds out or does 
not build a smudge. 

It would seem that they did the same here to the 
superficial observer. But we were not superficial ob- 
servers — at least Burridge was not. He studied ento- 
mology every night. After crawling carefully under 




The Reluctant Newsboy. 



his mosquito canopy, kicking his heels wildly in the 
air to scare away those who would crawl under the 
canvas with him, he commenced his researches. Usu- 
ally there was a flock of mosquitos purring away up in 
the gable end of his gauze tent. Then his career as the 
great human insecticide began. You have seen a base- 




He Wore his Mother Hubbard with Queenly Dignity. 

ball catcher working hard with a pitcher who delivers 
very wild balls. Well, that was Burridge to a nicety. 
There wasn't any mahopi about his action. One 
night after bagging considerable game, he stopped to 
examine and heft some of the best trophies. 



THE MAHOPI HABIT. 



51 



"Look here, Jones," said he, "this ^ne don't weigh 
as much by a quarter of a pound as those I killed this 
morning; just heft it once," and he tossed it over 
to me. 

He was right, and we asked the hotel clerk about 
the discrepancy in weight of the game of the place. 
We were informed that it would try the energies of 
one mosquito too severely to be obliged to work all the 
time, so it was arranged that tourists are to be chewed 
by different gangs. 

They work in two shifts, a night and a day shift. 
The day workers are large and gray, while, as Burridge 
discovered, those who burn the midnight electric light 
are smaller and are of a jet black color. 



The night gang seems to put more bichloride of 
scratch into its injections, but both shifts do a rushing 
business in the Dwight treatment. 

It is very amusing to see them when one set of 
hands replaces another. When the 6 o'clock whistle 
blows the day gang lays down its drills or stops its 
pumping works, as the case may be, wipes off" its bills 
and leaves its job. 

Then the little black fellows come right in and 
take up the work, which goes on without a hitch. 
This arrangement prevents premature breaking down, 
paresis and all those ills incident to overwork. Mahopi 
is a great institution. 




A Shark Hunter. 







"'"^/ci/y/"'^'^"^ 



CHAPTER XIV 



Tropical Fruits— Their General Lack of Ginger and Flavoring 
Extracts— Pomological Disappointments— Private Recipe for 
Making Bread Fruit. 




EFORE arriving, my palate 
reared up in my mouth in 
anticipation of a radiant, 
variegated, gastronomic 
treat in the way of new 
tropical fruits. I heard so 
much about bread fruit, 
custard apples, or cheri- 
moyers, mangoes, aligator 
pears, guavas and pome- 
granates, to say nothing 
about the oranges, ban- 
anas, cocoanuts and pineapples, that I made up my 



/I BANANAlPLANT/M»OJf«> 



mind that I would order the whole pomological shoot- 
ing match the first time I sat down at a table. 

I was the victim of a cruel disappointment. When 
I reached that part of the Hawaiian Hotel's bill of 
fare, denominated by One Lung, the waiter, as " Flute," 
there were apples, imported from California; grapes 
imported from California ; peaches, imported from Cali- 
fornia, and oranges, imported from California. 

I did not like to kick about my food in public, for 
the man who does so is usually the one who lives on 
cotton batting baker's bread and fried liver when 
at home. 

I didn't want the populace to think I had never 
eaten any fruit other than cucumber pickles and cod- 
fish balls, and so held my peace. 

But I went out on a still hunt for anything that 
grew on trees and could be chewed by a determined 
man with sound teeth. 

My first experience was with a fiery, untamed 
tamarind. It is an innocent looking product but it is 
loaded with vinegar. 

I had eaten tamarind paste in the States which 
tasted like condensed lemonade, and was very good, so 
when Mr. Castle handed me a brown pod about 
as big as a man's thumb, and stood back to see me 
break out and talk anarchy, I thought his precaution 
unreasonable. 

I tore open the shuck and found it contained a 
dark reddish mud in which were some hairs, that 



II 
II 



52 



ABOUT FRUIT— AND OTHER THINGS. 



53; 



looked as though the cook was a little careless, and 
two or three buttons. I culled out this debris and put 
the rest in my eager mouth. 

It wasn't bad. It tasted like chemically pure 
tartaric acid toned down by lemon juice. 




The Tamarind Effect. 

My teeth curled up their toes and rocked on their 
foundations. I have been going around ever since with 
a mouth drawn up like that of an enthusiastic amateur 
flute player. 

The name " breadfruit " is an attractive one and 
sounds toothsome. It had always been a youthful 
dream of mine to run away to sea and get wrecked on 
some balmy winter resort where I could go out and 
pluck my morning roll from the trees, and I still con- 
tinued to cherish the dream when I found later in life 
that it was frequently necessary to get out of a cold 
winter night and hustle around with a pan of dough 
because Mrs. Jones had forgotten to set the " emptyns" 
near enough to the register. 

But with all that, I am not willing to substitute 
breadfruit for bread without the fruit in the Jones 
family menu. 

For the first two or three days at the hotel I stuck 
up my nose at biscuit, rolls, bread, flannel cakes and 
all that, and called hard at the Chinaman for breadfruit. 

He invariably gave me the Chinese equivalent for 
the sentence, "I'm sorry, sir, but we are just out of 
breadfruit." That is, I suppose it was what he said. 
He may, however, have been calling me a thundering 
idiot. It is probably what he thought anyway. 

I soon learned that if I was going to eat bread- 
fruit I would have to be my own walking steward and 



possibly baker; so I started out to run down and corral 
a baking. 

I first fell into the clutches of a low-down Chinese 
fruit vendor who sold me a citron, warranting it the 
finest kind of salt-rising breadfruit. I toted this shame- 
less fraud around with me for two or three hours, until 
an acquintance casually asked me if I were going to 
make preserves. 

After being set right I went back and hunted up 
the Chinaman who failed to recognize me. In fact, he 
said he never saw me before and that I had done my 
business previously with his twin brother, who was a 
disgrace to the family and had just been taken to jail. 

He offered to sell me some taro root which was 
the genuine product of the flour and yeast tree, as he 
solemnly assured me on his yellow, slant eyed honor. 
But I had eaten taro and was angry. If I could have 
seen his dishonest brother it would have gone hard 
with one of us. 

I chased around under a hot sun until I ran across 
a native with the real thing. They were green and had 
a surface like an osage orange, and were about the size 
of the smaller bowling-alley weapons. 

I took it up to the hotel and told the steward that 
when it was light enough to go in the oven I wanted it 
cooked and served at our table. In two or three days, 




Jones Plucking Bread. 

or after it had ripened sufficiently, it was brought on. 

It was not to be cut in slices, as one might sup^ 
pose, but had to be broken open. I took a mouthful, 
and stopped proceedings to diagnose the symptoms. 

I believe that I hit it closer than a government 
assayer when I state that it was composed of 50 per 
cent sweet potato and 50 per cent fresh yellow bees- 
wax. If any one wishes to know what baked bread- 



54 



THIS IS ALSO ABOUT FRUIT. 



fruit is like let him take those articles in the proportion 
named, mix them together carefully, and eat while hot, 
as the cook books say. 

The most satisfying native fruits to be found 
are oranges, pineapples, and bananas, which are, of 
course, no novelties. 

Pomegranates may also be found in the big cities 
of the States if one hunts for them, and it is easier to 
get one there than in Honolulu. As every one knows, 
they look like Ben Davis apples, with a sort of escape 
valve on the blow ends. They are divided into four com- 
partments inside, each one being filled with cranberry 
sauce, in which is pretty thickly scattered loose pas- 
sementerie trimming. 

It takes patience to eat pomegranates, and I would 
pretty nearly as soon chew shoe pegs for sustenance. 

Cocoanut palms are thicker than lamp-posts in 
America, but they have a way of growing high, and the 
nuts are hard to get. I was told that I must eat a 
green cocoanut on the half-shell if I wanted to enjoy 
life. 

After serious difficulty we succeeded in getting a 
native to climb a tree and pluck some for us. They 
were cut open, and at the first one Burridge got wild 
because, as he said, we had been confidenced again. 
It contained nothing but some skimmed milk. 

What he wanted was the good old United States 
cocoanut with celuUoid insides. We cracked open 
another, and found after draining off the bilge water 
that it had just commenced to deposit celluloid. 

This we dug out with a spoon, and found it was 



like eating the white of an &%^, although it was a little 
smoother and tasted something like a slippery elm 
poultice. 

Down on Hawaii we met a native with a bag full 
of custard apples or cherimoyers. He sold them three 
for a quarter and we invested heavily. 

This fruit had been described as something unap- 
proachable. It had been called vegetable ice-cream 
without the ice. I had begun to get suspicious, and 
made my custard apple exploration cautiously, but was 
rather agreeably surprised at its coming somewhere 
near the plans and specifications given out by enthusi- 
astic travelers. 

Still there is no occasion for excitement over it. 
Custard apples are very like our papaws with the 
strong Indiana flavor eliminated. When green they 
have a faint taste of turpentine, as do the mangoes. 

The guavas are the fruit from which guava jelly is 
extracted. They grow on bushes that resemble the 
quince, have the external appearance of smooth lemons, 
and have an inside that looks like a minature water- 
melon with a faint pink tinge before it is ripe. The 
flavor is sweet, faintly acid and faintly like cough 
medicine. 

There are musk melons which grow on trees and 
are called paupuas, but they are not popular. The fact 
is, most tropical fruits lack flavor and point. 

I tried everything in sight, from pumpkins to 
skoke berries, but failed to find anything which re- 
motely approached strawberries at an ice-cream festival, 
or the old-fashioned watermelon by moonlight. 





CHAPTER XV 



Dusky Sirens— Sentiment and Poi — Paradise Found at Last— No 
Change of Style for Fifty Years — The Last of the Mother 
Hubbard. 




% 



1866 Mark Twain visited 
the Islands and described 
the female Kanaka's cos- 
tume as a nightgown, 
which fit her like a circus 
tent does its center-pole. 
The center-pole has swelled 
since then, but the descrip- 
tion answers just as well 
as it did twenty-five years ago. The dress, however, 
has acquired a name, although it is one which makes 
the American editor snort, paw the ground and shake 
his mane. 

Just why editors in general and paragraphers in 
particular should foam at the mouth and conduct them- 
selves in a way calculated to scare innocent children 
every time a Mother Hubbard is mentioned, is some- 
thing I could never understand. 

I am aware that they voice popular sentiment in 
this to a certain degree; and that a great many fool 
men go into cat fit delirium and revile the female sex 
because of its more or less secret passion for the 
Mother Hubbard. 

In these days, when coat buttons have but feeble 
tenacity of purpose, and when apple pie has a damp 
basement crust with defective drainage, if I couldn't 
find a better excuse to abuse my wife than her morning 
Mother Hubbard debauch, I would shut up. 

The garment is simple and effective and hangs 



■^"'^^!*f^"^'^"" ^^Tive5^ ppepe.Pingi!tapc 



more closely than any other in the lines of the classic 
raiment of ancient Greece and Rome, which is confes- 
sedly the esthetic garment in the whole range from fig 
leaves to plug hats and dress suits. 

The Mother Hubbard is good enough for me. I 
don't mean that exactly, either. It might look strange 
in connection with my brand of whisker. 

What I mean to say is that it is good enough for 
my female relations, if I am to be the umpire. I don't 
think it has ever had half a show in the States, al- 
though on the islands it has led the fashion for fifty 
years or more. 

Its origin was one of necessity. The missionary 
mothers found, when it came to clothing the converts, 
that this style of gown was the simplest and easiest 
made. 

When the Kanaka lady was aroused to the de- 
mands of polite society the missionaries were ready 
with a calico bag with a hole in the end for the head. 
These answered all the requirements, for the whites 
discreetly kept it dark that there were any such things 
as tailor-made suits. 

Thus the Mother Hubbard became grounded in 
the affections of the saddle-colored populace, and there 
it has stuck ever since. 



There are a number of solid people in Honolulu 
who have syndicated themselves together for the pur- 
pose of giving out the secret to the rest of the world 
that the islands are a paradise, and the only one which 
a great many of us will ever get a chance to see. 

The Hawaiian Islands' other name is " Paradise of 
the Pacific." 

Everybody thinks the place has a right to the 
name, because the air is softer than a love letter, and 
the showers come down as from a toy sprinkling-pot, 
and the moon is bigger, rounder, burns steadier and 
has more candle-power than that of any other company, 
and the sea-water is warmer than fresh-laid milk, and 
the ocean is bluer than a defeated candidate the day 
after election, and the scenery is more picturesque than 
a vision of jim-jams, and more grandly imposing than 
a State street policeman, and summer temperature 



55 



$6 



THE LADIES AND "POir 



hangs at about 75 degrees on the average, and winter 
is only six degrees colder, and the people could not be 
more hospitable If you had your will made leaving them 
a million and was enjoying mighty poor health. 

This is all true enough, but it isn't what makes 
the islands a paradise in my not particularly humble 
estimation. 




Rah, or the Mother Hubbard ! 

To me this place is an infringment on the paradise 
patent only because the Mother Hubbard has full 
swing. 

I am talking now to the fathers of grown-up 
daughters, present and prospective. Can anything 
in the masculine mind more closely approximate a 
place of sainted repose than this one, where there 
hasn't been a change of style for fifty years? 

Just think of it ! Young women can wear out 
their dresses if it takes two years. 

No wild jump from one style to another every 
sixty days, or before a man has got the bills of the last 
style paid. 

Hats the same way. With the masses — the female 
masses — small sailor hats of straw prevail, that can 
be worn alike winter and summer, and year in and 
year out. 

Of course, there are exceptions. Some of the 
people send to the States or to Paris for their gowns, 
but they can afford it, and the change is not com- 
pulsory, as it is in America. 



This island home of the Mother Hubbard is indeed 
a paradise. 

Aside from their dress I was somewhat disap- 
pointed in the fair fat sex of the islands. 

Beauty according to Caucasian standpoint, is rare 
among full blooded natives. Their eyes are big and 
black, with long lashes, but the other features are not 
pleasing, the lips being thick and the nose mashed 
down and running over into the cheeks. 

But among the half whites one's admiration is 
liable to be called upon quite frequently. With noses 
and mouths derived from the white side of the house 
but retaining the fringed lashes and the lustrous ox 
eyes of the Kanaka branch, the resulting combina- 
tion fits the picture more accurately as given out by 
travelers. 

The hands of nearly all the females are so good 
that the like is rarely seen in the States, except on 
statuary. This is because they do little work and also 




. The Classic Mother Hubbard. 

because, if my informant was correct, Kanaka mothers: 
roll the fingers of their girl babies to make them taper, 
some times to the point of brutality. 

We were riding on a railway train and I made a 
remark, overheard by the subject, on the wonderful 
beauty of the eyes and symmetry of the. hands of one 
of the passengers. 

After this the lady leaned over, put her hand up 
to her face, using her eyes as a Spanish woman might,^ 



DIFFERENT GRADES OF ^^POL" 



57 



in a way calculated to temporarily assuage my grief 
over the fact that Mrs. Jones was 5000 miles away. 

Then she looked off into dreamy space in a man- 
ner that would make a poet shuck his coat and go 
to work getting out a new rhyme for " ambushed fire 
'neath fringed lids." and to find a way to say something 
about " the midnight depths of the twin wells of her 
soul, measurable only by the plummet of human 
despair," and to say it gracefully and not as if the 
phrase had been dragged in by a pair of ice tongs. 

I asked a friend what he supposed she was 
thinking about. 

^ " Probably poi," he remarked, " and the superior 
taste of three over one-finger poi." 

As I have intimated above, work dosn't seem to 
bother the fair sex. There isn 't much to house-keeping, 
and the men do more of it than the women. 

Poi is the staff of life. It is cheap and wholesome 
— also fattening. 

It is made from the taro root, an esculent bulb 
about the size of a turnip, which grows in marshy 
places and has leaves very similar to water lilies. It is 
largely cultivated under irrigation. 

Boiled or baked it comes on the table a dirty 
white, with the texture and some of the taste of yam, 
though flatter. 

This root is peeled and usually powdered by hand 
in a large trough with a lava pestle, until the fiber is 
extracted and the coarse flour remains. This latter is 
moistened to the consistency of mush and is filed away 
for future reference. 

When poi is wanted it is thinned to the consistency 
of paste and allowed to stand a day or two until it 
sours. 



It is eaten by the fingers, the operator carefully 
taking his index finger, stirring it around in the bowl 
until a juicy gob is run down and captured. 

It is then elevated to the mouth with a gentle 
spiral movement and tucked away with a swing very 
much like that an elephant uses when he throws con- 
fectionary into his hay-mow with his trunk. 

After the second day, fermentation continuing, the 
poi becomes thinner and more sour, and it requires two 
fingers to carry the morsel safely to its destination. 
This is called " two-finger poi." 

The poi continues to " work " like yeast — it is the 
only thing on the islands except Chinamen which does 
so — and by easy stages rises to the heights of three or 
four-finger poi. 

This is the limit. Four-finger poi is put back to 
the one-finger grade by the addition of more mush. 

It looks like sour paste, it smells like sour paste, 
and it tastes like sour paste. The appetite for it is usu- 
ally acquired quickly and easily, and when one gets to 
be confirmed in the habit, there is nothing which will 
take its place. 

It is usually eaten with a relish in the shape of 
salt-dried fish. 

I became a shameless poi fiend, and can now 
understand the cockroaches' passion for the printing 
office paste-pot. 

One can readily see that without any changes of 
fashion and with housekeeping consisting of seeing that 
the cover is on the poi keg when not in use, and 
attending to it that the codfish is hung up after each 
meal, the Kanaka housewife has lots of time to put 
flowers in her hair and struggle against her two hundred 
and fifty pounds of fat, in an effort to look romantic. 




c^^ 



"Percentage of illiteracy small." 




CHAPTER XVI 



Kanaka Character — Children of Sentiment — Peculiar Financial 
Operations — Generous and Selfish at Once. 



'V>^ 




E opportunities for 
studying Kanaka char- 
acter are not as plenti- 
ful as some might sup- 
while every 
other person one meets 
on the streets is a na- 
tive, I was to a degree 
disappointed in not get- 
ting solidly acquainted 
with the average abo- 
rigine of the "Peaceful 
Isles." The upper class 
natives and half whites, 
who, by the way, side in thought and feeling with the 
coffee-colored fraction, and out-Kanaka the full-bloods 



58 



in their conflicts with adverse white influences, live as 
do their most aristocratic white neighbors. 

If anything, they are more punctilious and more 
careful in social usages than the whites themselves. 

That is, in public. 

It is said that when they go in for comfort with 
closed doors, they sit on the floor and eat raw fish and 
poi with their fingers in the old way, for their liking for 
poi, amounting to a passion, does not die with culture. 

And just so far as they adopt the customs and con- 
ventionalities of the whites they become uninteresting. 

It is the masses of any nation that furnish anthro- 
pologists food for thought and material for their pamph- 
lets loaded with words so hard that an ignorant person 
would take them for foul and abusive epithets. 

I am no anthropologist, and may never do any an- 
thropologizing to speak of, but I have more use for the 
every-day barn-yard citizen with a hitch in his gait 
caused by walking over plowed ground than I have for 
the one who has just got out of the hands of a de- 
corator and furnisher after being veneered and polished 
with a lot of brand new culture and affectations. 

So the Kanaka who has finished his or her educa- 
tion in Paris is less in*"eresT;ing to me than his humbler 
brother, who has never been off the islands. 

It is among the latter class that the old habits, 
traditions, beliefs, and lines of thought are pursued. 
As I said above one may see a great number without, 
unless by special effort, becoming acquainted with them. 
. The house servants are Chinese, Japanese, and 
Portuguese, the first predominating. 

The Kanakas are a race of philosophers and have 
a pardonable weakness for lying around in the shade. 



PECULIARITIES OF THE CIVILIZATION. 



59 



Field labor is uninviting to native nature, and in this 
line they have been pretty generally supplanted by the 
smooth and oily Celestial. 

They have no use for money except as a means of 
having a good time. The fear of a hungry to-morrow 
is not before them. 




A Sentimental Native. 

A day's labor will bring a week's poi, and poi with 
a little fish relish is all sufficient. The question of 
shelter need not worry any one, for a shack which 
affords as much protection as an American hen house, 
more than satisfies the average Kanaka. 

The fuel problem does not exist. The first week 
or two we were there we wandered around looking at 
the houses with a strange haunting sense of something 
wrong — something wanting. 

It was like eating bread with the salt left out. I 
couldn't exactly locate the deficiency. Burridge was 
troubled in the same way. 

"Jones," said he one day, stopping in the street, 
"what is the matter with these houses. They don't 
look right." 

" That's so, they don't." Then the light broke — I 
suddenly saw what it was. "I can tell what's the 
matter. They haven't got any chimneys. Its funny 
we never before noticed there are no chimneys in the 
place." Burridge was delighted to find out what had 
been fretting him, and he slept better that night after 
his mind was eased. 

The item for clothing is a small one, a straw hat, 
a cotton shirt and jeans trowsers fitting out the male 
Kanaka, and a similar hat and mother-hubbard doing 
likewise for the female. 

I purposely omit the mention of shoes and stock- 
ings for they are regarded more in the light of orna- 
ments among the lower classes. 



Bountiful nature having done so much in the way 
of pressing the button, the Kanaka finds it requires but 
little effort to do the rest. 

One has to forgive him for his habits of indolence. 
I am not sure but that, under the circumstances, in- 
dolence is simply rare good sense. 

An acquaintance with a Kanaka I have found is 
something which will stand cultivation. 

He comes naturally by many traits which are ac- 
counted rare and exceptional virtues in older civilized 
communities — and also many that are not. 

If one isn't too much steeped in utilitarian ideas 
he will come to like the natives immensely — as he likes 
children, or certain types of Southwestern whites who 
live for freedom — freedom from care, from work, from 
responsibility — the kind of freedom that Thoreau 
preached and tried to practice at Walden. 

It is of course a mistake to measure the Kanaka 
by the standard of — say Chicago. If this is done he 
will in advance be found wanting, for he is a creature 
of sentiment. 

A flower to him means more than a dollar, and a 
handshake more than bread. 







A Financial Transaction. 

The native wife may not have time to mend a rent 
in her mother-hubbard, but she can go out and pick 
flowers for a garland, sit in the shade for an hour to 
string them and deck herself like a queen, not because 
it is an anniversary or any special festial event but 
merely to present an attractive appearance as she 



6o 



HOSPITALITY AND BUSINESS ACUMEN. 



goes down to the fish market to procure a half pound 
of squid. 

The native fondness for flowers is as strong as a 
Chicago man's for money. 

The rites of hospitality have a sacredness in the 
eyes of the Kanaka uncontaminated by living in Hono- 
lulu, which exist in {^.v^ other places on earth. 

The Honolulu native has come to be much like 
the rest of the world in this respect, but the old hos- 
pitable ways prevail in the more remote parts of the 
islands. This hospitality may mean bankruptcy for the 
host, but it goes if he takes a fancy to you. 

He will massacre his only hog, assassinate his bunch 
of hens for your dinner, turn his family out of doors 
that you may have shelter, put himself, his wife, his 
sons and daughters, and his wife's relations at your 
disposal. 

He will even hustle for you. The extension of 
his hospitality even goes to limits that can not well 
be spoken of. 

On the other hand, if you are what is freely trans- 
lated as " no good," you haven't money enough to buy 
a meal from him, unless he sees a chance of making you 
suffer. Then the transaction will take on all the ap- 
pearance of revenge on the white race. 

In financial matters the Kanaka is peculiar. If 
they are conducted on a basis of friendship one is loaded 
with an excess of good measure if not a gift outright, 
but if it is straight business your friend becomes as 
keen as an oriental and as cold as a chattel mortgage 
shark. 

One day when we were ashore at a little landing 
on Hawaii, I picked up a primitive lamp cut out of lava 
in the refuse of a door-yard. 

I asked the gentleman with me to buy it, as he 
spoke the native language. 

He took me up to the hut and introduced me to 
the old lady who lived there. We shook hands and 
had a nice sociable talk without understanding any- 
thing each other said. 

My friend then told her I was a good man and 
that I wanted her lamp which was no earthly good. 

She very gladly gave it and was sorry she hand't 
another one to present me. 

I caught sight of a gourd calabash with a nice 
color, which would make a good wall decoration. It 
was cracked and useless. 

I proposed to buy it ©f her and started to nego- 
tiate for it, using an interpreter. This was business, 
and she modestly demanded $4 for it. The price of a 
good one in Honolulu is about 50 cents. Yet the 
lamp, which is one of the kind which is now only found 
in old graves, had a value of something between $15 
and $25. 

This incident is perfectly typical of native character. 

"^The natives are no plodders, and there must be 

excitement in their work to keep them at it. This is 

one of the reasons they are such capable sailors, there 



being enough of variety and danger in it to make the 
calling interesting. 

They are natural born politicians, having no prin- 
ciples to speak of and a deep-rooted yearning for a soft 
sitting job in the shade. 

They seem to fill the lower grades of offices ac 
ceptably, but a lack of executive ability keeps the 
masses out of the best places. The Queen's cabinet 
was frequently white with a sprinkling of half-whites. 
But the pure-blooded native shines as a policeman or a 
small clerk. There were about sixty of the former in 
Honolulu, although the chief and captains are whites 
born on the islands. 

Occasionally one sees a Kanaka behind a counter, 
usually as a clerk. The law seems to have attractions 
for those who rise above manual labor. 

This profession is the stepping stone to a political 
career, and besides it affords an unlimited scope for 
speech-making, something dear to the native heart. 
Native lawyers are not uncommon, but they are rarely 
entrusted with important cases. 

The educational system is one of high standing 
and the percentage of illiteracy is very small, nearly 
every native being able to read and write in his own 
language. 

They are brave in their own way. 

There have been but few tests of military pluck, 
and while they have not the dash in battle that Ame- 
ricans have in desperate situations or the dogged per- 
sistency of the British against odds, yet they will fight 
with vigor on accasions. 

In the olden times it was the sport of Hawaii kings 
to go shark killing. A catamaran was prepared with a 
large bowl of chopped chunks of executed criminals or 
enemies for bait. 

The boat was put to sea and the flesh was punched 
overboard through a hole in the bottom of the bowl. 

This in a short time attracted all the sharks in the 
vicinity. When they became thick as fleas it was the 
custom of the chiefs and kings to dive into the school 
and coming up under the monstrous sea wolves stab 
one as they swam to the surfaee. 

This may be great sport, but it would require more 
nerve than the average white man possesses. 

• It was the correct way of spending an afternoon 
for a Kanaka king, but as for me, give me lawn tennis. 

The achievements of some of the divers of the 
present day attest the fact that the old shark-hunting 
spirit is not entirely extinct. 

It is a pretty well advertised fact that the race is 
dying out. 

It is estimated that there were about 400,000 m- 
habitants when Cook discovered the islands, a little 
over a hundred years ago. Superintendent of Census 
Rodger s report places the native population in 1891 at 
about 40,000, showing a decrease of 25 per cent in the 
last ten years. The causes for this form a more suit- 
able subject for a medical treatise than a chapter of a 
descriptive work. 




U.5 Co/\L)/Vfa 5TAT/ON 

■Concession- 



CHAPTER XVII. 

A Smuggler Bold and the Custom House Russians. — The Pangs 
of an Amature in Crime.— War against the United States. 




EFORE High Heaven I am 
inn-o-cent !" 

I used this impassioned, 
fourth-act language, with the 
accent on the "o,"in address- 
ing the United States Gov- 
ernment the day we landed 
in San Francisco. The hour 
was 9 a. m. The place was 
the Oceanic steamship dock 
in that city. The situation 
which wrested from me the above leading emotional 
appeal was due to my being constructively charged 
'with smuggling — not actually in words, but by acts 
'of pantomine and brutal conduct. 

I We had been aroused by the birth steward of the 
{good ship Australia that day in the gray of the morn- 
jing to see the sun rise over the highest priced real 
{estate on the Pacific slope. 

I The air was chilly, but most of the passengers 

istood on deck watching the eastern purples turn to 

.bronze, and the bronze to orange, and the orange back 

to the grays and browns of the forbidding coast as the 

3un came up and we neared the Golden Gate. 

Many of the lady passengers grew sentimental at 
;he sight of the United States colors, for they had been 
lating their ham and eggs for months under the hybrid 



6i 



crazy quilt which did its work as the national flag of 
Hawaii. 

I think we all had a feeling of relief at once more 
getting back to a land where we could josh royalty 
with impunity — a land where an ace outranks a queen 
every time. 

I refer to this patriotic feeling because it really 
made our subsequent reception more painful. 

As we steamed slowly up the bay the custom- 
house minions overhauled us and climbed over the rail 
with their pockets bulging with documents. 

This reminded us that we would have to do some 
careless off-hand swearing, and possibly be required to 
expose the inside works of a grip-sack or two to the 
vulger official gaze, but we did not anticipate any 
Spanish inquisition business, or Russian convict treat 
ment. 

We had forgotten that Honolulu was the hot-bed 
of opium smuggHng, but it seemed that the custom- 
house officers had not. 

There was some fluttering among the passengers, 
especially those who had never before been out of the 
county, when the black whiskered custom-house keeper 
made us stand in line and gave us to understand that 
we musn't trifle with the United States. 

I suddenly remembered that I had bought a 
Chinese fiddle, some trinkets and a new hairbrush in 
Honolulu, and I commenced to feel as sneaking as that 
time way back in 1879 when I swindled the govern- 
ment out of a dog tax by hiding him in the range 
oven. 

He whined all the time I was talking to the asses- 
sor while I adroitly led the conversation away from the 
burning dog question. 

But the man who keeps the custom-house didn't 
say anything about the Chinese fiddles and souvenir 
spoons and hair brushes, and I was too polite to intro- 
duce such painful subjects. I thought I caught him 



62 



CUSTOM HOUSE EXACTIONS. 



looking suspiciously once or twice at my well-trained 
locks, and my heart throbbed, but he must have 
thought it was the engine if he heard it. 

He asked me a lot of fool questions about my age, 
color, sex, previous condition of servitude, occupation. 




Evading the Assessor. 

pulse, temperature, respiration, appetite for spirituous 
or intoxicating liquors, what my grandparents died of, 
and if living why are they doing so, and a number of 
other things that I fail to remember. Then I was told 
to stand up and swear to it. 

^ arose, and he pronounced a hoodoo on me, stat- 
ing, as near as I can remember, " Do-you-Strangulation- 
Jones-solemnly-swear-tum-te-tiddle-de-tum-with-mal- 
ice-aforethought-onery-towery-tickery-tee-the-goods- 
chattels-merchandise-dickery-dickery-dock-except-as- 
herein-set-forth-alibo-crackibo-tender-lee-to-the-best-of- 
your-knowledge-and-belief-s'elpyou." 

I told him I thought so and he let me go after I 
had signed my name. 

That seemed easy and I went back to the state- 
room and planted the fiddle and souvenir spoons deeper 
down in my gripsack to avoid mistakes. 

I confess that I began to have a feeling of vague 
unrest and wondered a little how they punished the 
Chinese fiddle and souvenir spoon brand of perjury in 
California. 

I even considered the advisability of going to the 
custom-house man and confessing to the spoons and 
the fiddle and filing an application with the government 
for all the mercy it had on hand. 

I talked with Burridge about it, and he said we 
should bluff the United States or bribe the officials. 

He thought if I gave up the fiddle, spoons and 
hairbrush, and $io in cash it would be all right. I kept 
getting more and more uneasy in my mind, and went 
on deck, where an old traveler who had been through 
the custom-house numerous times told horrible stories 
of the confiscation of property, and mentioned jewelry 
and silverware as being just what the officers were de- 
lighted to seize. 

I excused myself, went below, and dug out the 
spoons, depositing them in my coat-tail pockets. 

After that I had to walk around with great care 



for fear of bumping against something and being be- 
trayed by the clank of the silver. 

Sitting down was out of the question. I com- 
menced to realize that the criminal's lot is not a happy 
one. Although the day was cold my brow was beaded 
with perspiration. I firmly resolved if ever I got the 
spoons and the fiddle to Chicago, I would retire from 
the crime business and reform. 

All this time the Australia was nearing the wharf. 
It was finally warped in and the gang-plank stuck out. 

Then all those male passengers who had wives or 
sweetharts on hand to receive them, and those lady 
passengers who had husbands or young men there 
rushed together and clinched in a very vigorous man- 
ner. 

I managed to walk down the plank gingerly, yet 
with a certain dignity with my guilty coat tails dang- 
hng heavily behind. A steward followed with the grip 
containing the contrabard fiddle. 

We were met by a line of men armed with chunks 
of chalk. 

I felt that the critical moment had arrived and 
opened the grip with as much of an appearance of in- 
nocence as a man steeped in crime can assume on fair 
notice. 

The inspector, who I was sure could see that fiddle 
through several strata of old clothes, paper novels and 
democratic lines, merely bent down and chalked some 
marks on the grip while he watched a pretty girl dicker 
with a hack man. 

"Is that all?" I asked. 

"That's all, unless you nave something in the bag- 
gage-room." 




The "Courier for the Czar." 

I nearly fainted \vith joy at getting through and 
swindling the government out of a dollar and a quar- 
ter. To be sure we had five boxes in the steamer's 
baggage-room, but they only contained artists materi- 



■MBl-^a 






CUM GRANO SALTS. 



63 



als, Buridge's sketches of the volcano of Kilauea, lava 
from the same, and a lot of truck on which there was 
no commercial value and therefore not dutiable. 

We told the inspector we would take the boxes at 
once to avoid a trip to the wharf again. 

A change flashed over his countenance. 

He saw in us a pair of desperate opium smugglers. 

Moreover, a new hght dawned on us. We thought 
we had reached a place called United States, but were 
mistaken. It was Russia. 

We mildly preferred a request to have the boxes. 

" Youse will not getivitch thim-off to-day-ivitch. 
Dey has got to be examined-off." 




" Clinched." 

"Can't you examine them now?" 

" Oi dunno . Av youse git somewan t' open de 
boxesivitch an' putofif upivitch fur it p-r-raps yonse 
kin," remarked the custom-house boyer carelessly. "Oi 
hov a mon ferninst-ivitch t' office what wuldo yure 
wurruk chape-off" 

The man "ferninst de office" came up, and we saw 
that he was armed with an obtuse ax and a crowbar 
which had curviture of the spine. 

We hired him for $2 to open the boxes. 

The ax and crowbar maestro turned a box up on 
edge and played an obligato in G minor on it with his 
weapons, while Burridge danced in the background. 

The man with the ax had the instincts of a burg- 
lar but not the qualifying experience. 

No artist can see his work pried out of a mess of 
debris with a crowbar without suffering the pangs of 
vivisection. 

But when the despots dragged out one of Bur- 
ridge's volcano sketches which were as red as the floor 
where a murder has been committed, the whole crowd 
was paralyzed with admiration. 

"Whooroo, but they'r illigent," exclaimed one of 
the Slavs. 



"That's what." assented another who seemed to 
have an idea that he was the Czar's understudy. 

" They'er just as foine as a fortygraf," commented 
the head boyer, " an' they'r worruks of airt, an' as such 
are jutyable. Saze thim." 

Burridge was in a spasm of apprehension and pro- 
tested that he was an American citizen, had bought 
his painting material in Chicago and had a right under 
the law to bring in the county studies and sketches 
made abroad. 

The head Russian stopped him early. " I belave 
you'r a loir, sor, and I belave you'r furrinors and you'r 
so crazy anxius about thim boxes that I woulden't fall 
dead av we wuz todiskivver opeum in them. They are 
sazed in the name of the law. Youse otter be ashamed 
av yersilves comin' to our country an' thryin' to desave 
de gover'mint wid yer ile painted kromos." 

It was in vain we protested that our fore-fathers 
fought and bled and died at Bunker Hill. The only 
response we got was in choicest Russian. The inspec- 
tor merely answered in witty Slav repartee, " Aw, wot's 
'atin youse." 

We were led away in a nearly fainting condition 
and clambered aboard a telega, as George Kennan says, 
and directed the driver to take us to the Occidental 
etape. 

Here Burridge started in to drown his grief in 
vodka. We were advised by sympathetic friends to 
hire a custom-house solicitor, fee him well, and declare 
war on the United States. 

We did this, of course. HostiUties commenced 
by our going down to the custom-house and swearing 
to nine different documents at once. I didn't know 
exactly what it was for, but I expected it was to bring 
trouble to some one very soon. 

Then we had to chase around and see people who 
had influence with the czar of the custom-house who 
finally granted us an audience after a dozen or so trips. 
We told him we wanted to get Mr. Burridge's paintings 
and my chunks of lava out of the clutches of the gov- 
ernment as soon as possible. 

He wanted to know what else we had in the 
boxes. 

I frankly told him that there was nothing except 
a pair of old trousers that Mrs. Jones would want to 
cut down for Jones, Jr., and I couldn't see what use 
the United States had for them. 

I also freely explained how all the dutiable goods 
I had brought in had been easily smuggled through on 
the day of my arrival, and those which remained were 
entitled to entry free of duty, and we wanted them 
right away. 

He was very kind with his mouth, and promised 
it should be attended to at once. But it wasn't. We 
stayed with him several days before we got the goods, 
swearing to some new document every few minutes 
before a notary during business hours and without the 
assistance of a notary after business hours. We finally 
found out what was the matter. Had we been really 
genume opium smugglers we would have got through 
long before. They are the only people who have no 
trouble with the officials. 




FINIS 






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